a bachelor's degree in homeland security, law enforcement & firefighting is more popular than many other degrees. In fact, it ranks #11 out of 38 on popularity of all such degrees in the nation. As a result, there are many college that offer the degree, making your choice of school a hard one.
College Factual looked at 53 colleges and universities when compiling its 2025 Best Homeland Security, Law Enforcement & Firefighting Bachelor's Degree Schools in the Southwest Region ranking. Combined, these schools handed out 7,955 bachelor's degrees in homeland security, law enforcement & firefighting to qualified students.
Choosing a Great Homeland Security, Law Enforcement & Firefighting School for Your Bachelor's Degree
Your choice of homeland security, law enforcement & firefighting for getting your bachelor's degree school matters. Important measures of a quality homeland security, law enforcement & firefighting 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 bachelor's degree school is important to ensure a good education, not just how well they do in a particular major. To account for this we consider a college's overall Best Colleges ranking which itself looks at a host of various factors like degree completion, educational resources, student body caliber and post-graduation earnings for the school as a whole.
Early-Career Earnings
One measure we use to determine the quality of a school is to look at the average salary of bachelor's graduates during the early years of their career. That is, everyone wants their bachelor's degree to be worth something, and salaries are one measure of determining that.
Other Factors We Consider
The metrics below are just some of the other metrics that we use to determine our rankings.
Major Focus - How many resources a school devotes to homeland security, law enforcement & firefighting students as compared to other majors.
Major Demand - The number of homeland security, law enforcement & firefighting students who choose to seek a bachelor's degree at the school.
Educational Resources - How many resources are allocated to students. These resources may include educational expenditures per student, number of students per instructor, and graduation rate among other things.
Student Debt - How much debt homeland security, law enforcement & firefighting students go into to obtain their bachelor'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 homeland security, law enforcement & firefighting related body.
Our full ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best schools for homeland security, law enforcement & firefighting students working on their bachelor's degree.
More Ways to Rank Homeland Security, Law Enforcement & Firefighting Schools
The homeland security, law enforcement & firefighting school you choose to invest your time and money in matters. To help you make the decision that is right for you, we've developed a number of major-specific rankings, including this list of the Best Homeland Security, Law Enforcement & Firefighting Bachelor's Degree Schools in the Southwest Region.
In addition to our rankings, you can take two colleges and compare them based on the criteria that matters most to you in our unique tool, College Combat.
Test it out when you get a chance! You may also want to bookmark the link and share it with others who are trying to make the college decision.
Best Schools for Bachelor’s Students to Study Homeland Security, Law Enforcement & Firefighting in the Southwest Region
The following list ranks the best colleges and universities for pursuing a bachelor's degree in homeland security, law enforcement & firefighting. Only those schools that rank in the top 20% of all the schools we analyze get awarded with a place on this list.
10 Top Southwest Region Schools for a Bachelor's in Homeland Security, Law Enforcement & Firefighting
These are some additional schools worth mentioning that are also great but just didn't quite make the cut to earn our top Best Homeland Security, Law Enforcement & Firefighting Bachelor's Degree Schools in the Southwest Region award.
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.
Some other college data, including much of the graduate earnings data, comes from the U.S. Department of Education’s (College Scorecard).