Administration of Justice/Criminal Justice Degrees

[Jks9199]

Instead of sidetracking the thread regarding whether or not people's degrees are related to their jobs, I'll start a new thread.

One post mentioned that lots of cops have ADJ/CJ degrees of one sort or another. And I know many of us would discourage someone from seeking an ADJ/CJ degree, as a loose rule. After all, the academy and FTO will provide all the education in the cop stuff you need... and it's a degree that doesn't have a lot of practical application outside police work. But you never know when a degree in something else will be useful, like a business degree or accounting degree setting up a good background for investigating financial crimes.

I generally suggest that people study something that interests them, whatever their end goal is, so that they get decent grades because they're actually interested, instead of studying something "to get a job." (I know one person who didn't discover till he did a senior-year internship with a PD that HE DIDN'T like law enforcement, and definitely didn't want to be a cop!)

What do you think? Is a CJ/ADJ degree good? Bad? Or does it just depend?

[lewisipso]

Without knowing anything about college I was inclined to seek a CJ degree. Never made it. However, after talking to plenty of cops over the years it was always a business degree of some kind that popped up.
I think it just depends.

[OXCOPS]

I got my BSCJ. I learned alot of things and made some great contacts in the field. However, since most departments requiring a degree don't care what it's in, hindsight says I should have gotten something else. You can't really use a CJ degree in many other fields outside of CJ.