Criminal Justice: The Unethical Cash Cow

[sanantone]

I figured that there might be current and former criminal justice students here who would be interested in discussing this topic. I have found it extremely disturbing how many criminal justice programs are popping up. As some schools are seeing declining enrollment, they have been starting up criminal justice programs. They know this major attracts a lot of students. I think it has the potential to break into the top 10 of most popular majors in the U.S. It might already be in the top 10.

The problem I have with this is that criminal justice degrees are not in demand. There are a lot of police officer openings in some states. There are always a lot of security guard openings everywhere. However, a very small percentage of these jobs require a degree. Among the jobs that require a degree, a very small percentage exclusively require a degree in CJ. This is why Payscale ranked CJ as the second most underemployed major.
Criminal Justice Major Underemployment Stats

According to the 2013 Georgetown study of 2010/2011 unemployment rates, newly graduated CJ majors aren't doing so great in that area either. They might be doing a little better now if cities have stopped cutting back on the police officer positions that don't even require a degree in the first place.
http://www9.georgetown.edu/grad/gppi...mes.2013.2.pdf

But, one of my biggest pet peeves is that it seems like most students don't know what is going to be studied in criminal justice programs. It is not a social work degree, it is not the police academy, it is not forensic science unless it has that concentration attached, and it is far from being the best preparation for law school.
http://www.potsdam.edu/academics/AAS...-of-Majors.pdf

I thought students being bored with CJ was just a problem at my type of school since it is a nationally-accredited school that accepts students who can barely read. It's amazing how many of them think they can immediately start working as police officers after they graduated without having to go through an academy. However, for the introductory course of my PhD program, we read an article that discussed how criminal justice students aren't really interested in criminal justice after they discover what criminal justice is really about. My professor has also found this to be the case at the universities for which he's taught. This really isn't an issue at the graduate level because those students have already decided that CJ is interesting enough to continue studying it. Still, the number of PhDs in CJ aren't enough to keep up with the growth of undergraduate programs, so schools are still heavily relying on sociology PhDs to fill the gap.