The Salespeople at My Former Employer Lied to Prospective Students

[sanantone]

The enrollment "advisors" at my former college lied to all of my students about what one could do with a certificate or associate's in criminal justice. I don't know if they just outright lied or they have little understanding of the field. My guess is that it's a little of both.

A common complaint from my students is that the salespeople told them that they will make a lot of money with their certificates in CJ and that they can become probation/parole officers with an associate's in CJ. The truth is that a certificate in CJ doesn't really have much more value than a high school diploma. Over 90% of law enforcement jobs don't even require a degree. In Texas, almost all of the probation/parole jobs require at least a bachelor's degree. My students started to express a lack of motivation after speaking to students who just graduated from the program. Many are not employed in the field, one is a security guard, one was offered a job as a part-time dispatcher at a very small police department that would have paid her less than $12 an hour, and one is working in a position at a law office that only requires a high school diploma. She's not a paralegal or legal assistant because she wasn't trained as one. She's more of an administrative assistant who does some minor cleaning, takes phone calls, grabs coffee, helps lawyers carry their paperwork to the courthouse, makes copies, etc.

I have a feeling that it is quite common for the admissions "counselors" at for-profit colleges to misrepresent the job prospects of degree programs, but non-profits also have their hands dirty with advertising CJ programs as the way to become a cop. When I go to their CJ websites or see their billboards advertising their CJ programs, I almost always see a picture of a police officer or a security guard. Can you believe that programs advertise that you can become a security guard with your CJ degree? Most security jobs pay less than $15 an hour, and most security companies will hire anyone with a high school diploma and a clean criminal record.

I often felt guilty in my former job. It was terrible how the students were paying $19,000 for a certificate and $28,000 for an associates. I know community colleges are heavily subsidized, but most of my students did not apply to them because they did not know they only charge $2,000 per year. I'm afraid the CCs wouldn't have been a good option for them anyway because most would have been stuck in a year or two of remedial courses. A lot of my students couldn't even read or write at the 6th grade level.

One of the worst parts is that the school advertised the CJ program as hands-on, but didn't want to purchase any equipment. They wanted the low-paid instructors to purchase cheap stuff out of their own pockets. Our former CJ chair would put together mock crime scenes that were so unrealistic that they had no value. While the students complained about instructors who just sat there and never lectured, they didn't really want to hear lectures. They wanted to do law enforcement scenarios. Their expectation, and this is quite common in all CJ programs, is that the program was going to be like a police academy. They wanted to go to the gun range, drive patrol cars, and handcuff people. I told them straight up that if they did not want to listen to lectures, then they were in the wrong major. CJ is a social science with a little law thrown in. They didn't seem to get that. I told them that no matter which school they attended CJ degree programs will be a lot like sociology programs. I had an instructor tell me that the students didn't want to learn about social problems. You can't teach CJ without teaching social problems. If there were no social problems, there would be no criminal justice system!

One good thing my school started to do was give background checks to prospective students, but several of them have admitted to smoking marijuana. Unless they are really good at lying and nothing comes up while interviewing their friends, family, neighbors, and former employers and coworkers, they are not going to get into a police department if they smoked marijuana in the past couple of years. Another terrible thing is that we had a 60-something year old man in the program who wanted to become a criminal investigator. He had to get around the school in a motorized chair. There is no way in hell he is going to get that job with his age and limited mobility; he doesn't even know how to use a computer.