Criminal Justice: The Unethical Cash Cow

[sanantone]

These programs are hardly exclusive to those schools. Agreed, it's a caveat emptor world. In an ideal universe you would like to think you could trust a non-profit school, but then what non-profit school actually doesn't have to worry about profit.

The exception would be the highly-ranked programs. They don't want to gain a reputation for having a bunch of unemployed alumni because that would eventually hurt their rankings. That is why UT Austin and Texas A&M are slowing down the growth of the petroleum engineering programs. But then again, most graduates of highly-ranked programs won't have a hard time finding a job. Even someone with a degree in paranormal psychology from Yale could land a job in an investment bank.

The first explosion in criminal justice programs was decades ago when the federal government started funding colleges through LEEP to educate police officers. The program was well-meaning. Everyone thought that education would make better officers, but many schools quickly threw together CJ programs just to receive funding. CJ programs were considered "cop shops" and on par with diploma mills. It took a long time for CJ to be taken somewhat seriously in academia after that.