The lack of a "pure" criminal justice program at the doctoral level is quite disheartening. From all accounts, anyone seeking a distance Ph.D. in the CJ field must acquiesce to a realted field of study and hope for the best. The closest programs I can find with a CJ focus are: Capella- Public Safety Program (CJ Specialization) Walden- Human Services (CJ Specialization) Fielding- Human Development (Research directed into CJ) NSU- Conflict Analysis & Resolution I found a few threads discussing Nova Southeastern launching a Ph.D. in Criminal Justice (On-Line format) in early 2009. I sent NSU an email several months ago requesting details and surprisingly there was no response. Does anyone have additional details? I am looking to transition into academia (community college or teaching university). My undergraduate/graduate degrees are from traditional universities. I have 13 years of local/federal Law Enforcement experience to compliment my classroom learning. I wonder how these "pseudo" CJ degrees are perceived. Should I wait for the NSU program ( its appearance has been rumored for over a year) or bite the bullet and choose from one of the three above? I am also interested if anyone has any recent experience with NSU's Conflict Analysis program. There were some previous threads relating problems with disorganized class delivery and limited support from faculty. Anyone care to comment on improvements? Thanks for all of your help.
Regarding CJ at the doctoral level, only two things matter in this order-of-importance: 1. Did the student complete a dissertation? 2. Did the student complete 18 graduate-level credits (coursework) in CJ as his specialization? All of the programs that you mentioned are extremely adequate for the utility that you're seeking.
Thank you for your input. Are you speaking as a faculty member in this area or from general knowledge? How important is the class designator when evaluating graduate units. My graduate degree is from Boston University. All of my courses had a CJ prefix. All of the Ph.D. programs I listed use alternate designators (i.e. PBSF, HUMN, etc.). The one exception I found was NCU. While their Ph.D. is technically in business, the CJ specialization uses the CJ preifx for those specific courses. Your thoughts here?
I'm just speaking from general knowledge in this area. You indicated that you wanted to transition into a community or teaching at the university level, so that helps to narrow down your needs. If that's all you want, then it's possible to achieve it with just a Masters degree. However, if you get an online doctorate with a CJ specialization, then it definitely makes you more marketable, especially since universities are required to have a specific percentage of faculty with terminal degrees in their field; thus, you would help the school to maintain it's RA status. However, if you want to be a researcher at a major research university, then a RA online doctorate with a CJ specialization is probably going to be inadequate, unless you already have your foot in the door. It varies between schools. I graduated with a CJ Masters from a research university and when I transferred to an online doctoral program, the online school wanted me to re-take their statistics course because the prefix designator on the statistics class from the research university began with CJ (CJ - quantitative analysis), so it wasn't readily apparent that it was a statistics class. What does that tell you about prefix designators? It probably means more within the school itself, instead of transferring it to another school. Having a CJ designator makes it abundantly clear that the students specialization is in that field, but it's not the only criteria that can be used. The title of a course can be equally important, in some cases. Some of the minor issues you're examining don't have any relevance in the big picture. If you can simply get a RA doctorate, then you'll have move a mountain.
nova I contacted Nova about 1 year ago about their CJ program. They have all the information and courses set up but they are trying to get it approved. Maybe they had trouble and they are no longer doing it. I'm not sure. I last talked to the dean this past summer. He said that the openning of the program has been delayed.
