The University of Phoenix's school of criminal justice: Right or Not?

There are several reasons why the University of Phoenix is not the best choice for you if you are thinking of obtaining a degree in criminal justice. The first reason is that the degrees offered by UoP are limited in their scope. It offers only two degrees - a Bachelor of Science in Criminal Justice Administration and a Master of Science in Administration of Justice and Security. Those of you who want to look beyond a mere administration-oriented degree and are looking for employment in all the new areas opened up by recent events such as homeland security or international terrorism, public safety management, economic and cyber crime etc will find UoP inadequate for your purposes.

After earning a degree in criminal justice from UoP you will find that you are eligible to apply for only those jobs where the other applicants, your competitors, have management and administration degrees from even more reputed colleges and universities such as Harvard or Cornell or Wharton Business School. Most of the time you will find yourself to be just an also ran and no better than that. Second, you will find the course curriculum to be such that you get more of a management orientation instead of the kind of sharp criminal justice focus that you are seeking. A large part of the curriculum will involve completing courses that do not have the prefixes you want - CRJ, JUS or CRIM.

The institute is also not the best choice for you if you are not yet working and if you are below 23 years of age although recently the University has changed its focus and is now targeting younger traditional students. But this change of focus has taken place recently and nobody knows how successful young traditional students will be in their professional life once they pass out with an online UoP criminal justice degree. It will take sometime before clear patterns emerge and it becomes accepted that UoP degrees work well even for traditional non-working students.

Third, an online UoP degree is certainly not the best for you if you are a traditional student seeking an education to make yourself qualified for academic and teaching jobs. With an UoP online degree you may at best be recruited by your own university, that is, UoP, or other such online universities which have a different take on the academic rigors needed for teaching, but most everywhere else your applications for teaching jobs will be rejected. If you are looking at a teaching career a UoP online degree, or, for that matter any online degree, is not right for you. You should try for a traditional on-campus degree or at the most you should try for an online degree offered by a highly reputed state university in case such an online degree is available in criminal justice.

Many state universities and colleges are now joining the fray for offering online degrees in criminal justice and you should look at them first instead of seeking an online degree in criminal justice from UoP.