If you plan on getting your doctor's degree in criminal justice & corrections, you won't be alone since the degree program is ranked #83 in the country in terms of popularity. As a result, there are many college that offer the degree, making your choice of school a hard one.
For its 2025 ranking, College Factual looked at 4 schools in the United States to determine which ones were the best for criminal justice & corrections students pursuing a doctor's degree. Combined, these schools handed out 276 doctor's degrees in criminal justice & corrections to qualified students.
Choosing a Great Criminal Justice & Corrections School for Your Doctor's Degree
Your choice of criminal justice & corrections for getting your doctor's degree school matters. Important measures of a quality criminal justice program can vary widely even among the top schools. To make it into this list, a school must excel in the following areas.
A Great Overall School
The overall quality of a doctor's degree school is important to ensure a quality education, not just how well they do in a particular major. To make it into this list a school must rank well in our overall Best Colleges for a Doctor's Degree ranking. This ranking considered factors such as graduation rates, overall graduate earnings and other educational resources to identify great colleges and universities.
Early-Career Earnings
One measure we use to determine the quality of a school is to look at the average salary of doctorate graduates during the early years of their career. This is because one of the main reasons people pursue their doctor's degree is to enable themselves to find better-paying positions.
Other Factors We Consider
In addition to the above, you should consider some of the following factors:
Major Focus - How many resources a school devotes to criminal justice & corrections students as compared to other majors.
Major Demand - The number of criminal justice & corrections students who choose to seek a doctor's degree at the school.
Educational Resources - The amount of money and other resources allocated to students while they are pursuing their degree. These resources include such things as number of students per instructor and education expenditures per student.
Student Debt - How much debt criminal justice & corrections students go into to obtain their doctor's degree and how well they are able to pay back that debt.
Accreditation - Whether a school is regionally accredited and/or accredited by a recognized criminal justice & corrections related body.
Our full ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best colleges for criminal justice & corrections students working on their doctor's degree.
Since picking the right college can be one of the most important decisions of your life, we've developed the Best Criminal Justice & Corrections Doctor's Degree Schools ranking, along with many other major-related rankings, to help you make that decision.
Best Schools for Doctorate Students to Study Criminal Justice & Corrections in the United States
Below you'll see a list of the best colleges and universities for pursuing a doctor's degree in criminal justice & corrections.
Every student pursuing a degree in a doctor's degree in criminal justice & corrections has to look into University of Cincinnati - Main Campus. UC is a fairly large public university located in the city of Cincinnati.
After graduating, criminal justice doctorate recipients typically make about $68,763 in their early careers.
It's difficult to beat Nova Southeastern University if you want to pursue a doctor's degree in criminal justice & corrections. NUS Florida is a fairly large private not-for-profit university located in the suburb of Fort Lauderdale.
Those criminal justice & corrections students who get their doctor's degree from Nova Southeastern University earn $11,900 more than the average criminal justice grad.
The bars on the spread charts above show the distribution of the schools on this list +/- one standard deviation from the mean.
The Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), a branch of the U.S. Department of Education (DOE) serves as the core of the rest of our data about colleges.
Your choice of criminal justice & corrections for getting your doctor's degree school matters. Important measures of a quality criminal justice program can vary widely even among the top schools. To make it into this list, a school must excel in the following areas.
