What Criminal Justice and Corrections Graduates Earn

Median earnings at 1, 4, and 5 years (College Scorecard)

Nothing on this page is a survey response or a recruiter's claim: the $42,948 year-one median and the $57,372 year-five median for Criminal Justice and Corrections come from federal earnings records pooled across 985 bachelor's programs. The headline median weights programs by graduates counted (83,118 at year one); the second column is the unweighted median program, printed so the method stays visible.

Earnings in this field climb $14,424 between the first and fifth year, a 34% rise that trails the all-fields pattern (the median field in this dataset pays $45,010 at year one and $65,763 at year five). Early-career growth this shape usually means the first job is a foothold: licensure, a portfolio, or a first promotion does the heavy lifting.

The Pell split adds a second lens on the $42,948 year-one median: graduates who received Pell Grants earn a median of $43,350, and graduates who did not earn $43,727, a gap of $377. Read it as a map of where each group studied and the networks they carried in, not as the degree paying two different wages for the same work.

Inside its own CIP family, Criminal Justice and Corrections ranks 5 of 5 published bachelor's fields by five-year earnings; the family median at that horizon is $70,475. Its closest sibling is Security Science and Technology at $61,228, above this field's $57,372. Family comparisons strip out the broad field effect and leave the specific program choice exposed.

Ranked across all 182 published fields, Criminal Justice and Corrections stands number 128 by five-year earnings and number 114 by first-year earnings, and number 158 from the lowest median debt. Those three ranks together are the field's fingerprint: high earn rank with a low debt rank is the combination students are actually shopping for, and this field's spread between them is 30 places.

The debt side of the same degree

The median graduate in this field leaves school owing $24,180 in federal loans, the graduate-weighted median across the 586 programs reporting debt. That is 56% of the first-year median earnings, or about 6.8 months of gross pay at $42,948 a year. On the standard 10-year plan at the 2026-27 undergraduate rate of 6.52%, the payment is $275 a month and interest adds $8,797 over the life of the loan. Price your own borrowing with the student loan payoff calculator, and test the whole degree in the college ROI calculator or the college major ROI calculator.

Where graduates of this field earn the most

Where a student studies inside this field matters at least as much as the field itself. These five programs post the strongest five-year medians in Criminal Justice and Corrections among programs with at least 30 graduates in the count, led by Union Institute & University at $136,669, against a national field median of $57,372.

High program medians concentrate in high-wage metros and selective intakes, so read $136,669 as a market fact before reading it as a quality verdict. Costs for the same programs are checkable in the degree cost calculator and the net price estimator.

Two more facts about the shape of this field: the five highest-paying programs in the table account for only 0.4% of the 104,269 graduates counted at five years, so the top of the table is a thin slice and not the field's center; and the leading program's five-year median of $136,669 sits 138% above the national field median of $57,372. Its median debt, $18,750, runs below the field median of $24,180, which is the trade a student at the top of this table is actually being offered.