 Is a criminal justice major or a criminal justice degree worth it? That's where we're gonna be going over today. But before we get into that, make sure to gently tap the like button in order to defeat the evil YouTube algorithm. On this channel, we talk about personal finance, college degrees, careers, and opportunities that are gonna lead you to success. And we also go over how you can avoid some of the common mistakes that so many people end up making. Now if that interests you and you haven't done it already, go ahead and hit that subscribe button and ring the notification bell so that you never miss out. And with that out of the way, let's jump right into it. What is a criminal justice major? As a criminal justice major, you would be studying law enforcement techniques as well as emergency management strategies. You'd also be working on the skills that you would need in order to work in a court or a correctional facility. Now this is a very common major and a lot of people graduate with it every year. There's also different versions of this one. So for instance, there's one that's a criminal justice and law enforcement administration degree with 15,000 graduates. And another one that's a criminal justice and safety studies with 30,000 graduates. And depending on which field you wanna go to, different programs throughout the country are gonna have different concentrations. Now of course, one career path you could go into is becoming a law enforcement officer, but you could also study forensics. You could go into criminal justice administration. You could work as a prison guard. There are a lot of different career paths that you can go down with this one and we're gonna get into that a little bit later. Now with these videos, when it comes to evaluating these different degrees, I like to break it down into four different categories. So first we're gonna talk about salary or earnings potential. Now according to PayScale, people who graduate with this degree are gonna make around $40,000 a year starting out and 66,000 in mid-career pay. Now when you compare this to an extremely high-paying degree like petroleum engineering or a low-paying degree like recreational therapy, you see that it is kind of on the lower side. But like I said before, one career path you might go down is becoming a police officer or a detective and they're gonna make around $65,000 a year. However, when you look at the amount of education that you need, you're gonna notice that it says see how to become one and the reason it has a link to something else is because it's complicated. The educational requirements are gonna change depending on the state you live in, the city you live in and all kinds of other factors. So for instance, there are many law enforcement positions that don't require any degree whatsoever. Sometimes you have to go to a police academy, sometimes you have to wait until you're 21 years old in order to apply for the police job. There are certain jobs that require you to take a few classes, there's some that require an associates degree, some require a bachelor's degree. However, very few of them require you to specifically get a criminal justice degree and that is a big problem which we're gonna touch on a little bit more later. One career path that typically is going to require you to get a degree would be a probation officer or a correctional treatment specialist. They make around $54,000 a year but usually you don't have to get a criminal justice degree in order to get into that career path either. And there are honestly a ton of other careers out there that you could get into if you're interested in criminal justice and most of them don't require you to have a criminal justice degree. Now there's a lot of variability in this degree. So for instance, you can graduate with a bachelor in science or a bachelor of arts. And there's also a lot of variability depending on what school you go to and what their focuses are. Now with that being said, most people consider this one to be a social science degree and these types of degrees make around $2.5 million over a lifetime which is slightly above average which is 2.4 million for all different types of college degrees. So overall all things being equal I'm gonna give this one a salary score of 6.5 out of 10. Next we're gonna be talking about satisfaction and I'm gonna break this one up into two different areas. We're gonna talk about meaning and then job satisfaction. So meaning is basically how much do you think your job positively impacts the world and job satisfaction is how much do you enjoy doing your job. So when it comes to meaning, according to PayScale a criminal justice degree is gonna have a score of about 56% which means 56% of people think that their job positively significantly impacts the world. You can compare this to a really high meaning score like most of the health related degrees have high scores or a really low meaning score like plastics engineering technology. And you'll see that this one is relatively average it definitely doesn't pop out but it's also not really bad. Now when you look at specific careers on PayScale like let's say you become a detective or a criminal investigator they say that the meaning score is around 78% and job satisfaction is going to be 74%. You can compare this to one where both are really high like clergy or one where both are really low like parking lot attendant. And you see that this one is gonna be average or even higher than average. So that's definitely going to be a good sign and I would say a lot of the time if you go into law enforcement you're gonna end up working in a government job. Now whether that be state, local sometimes you might even work for the federal government. Government jobs tend to be relatively high when it comes to job satisfaction. They're relatively chill as well. I'm not gonna get into too much detail here and depending on what the job is I might be completely wrong here but a lot of the time government jobs tend to be relatively low stress. This is what I've experienced when I've done internships for instance and what my friends have experienced when we've talked about different careers that they went into. And I'm sure that will be different depending on the career path that you go down. Now when it comes to the amount of people who regret getting their major, social science degrees tend to be some of the highest regretted types of majors. So for instance they're the fourth most regretted type of major at 29% of the people who get a social science degree regretting it and the reason is because they're too general and practical and it's hard to find a job without further studies. However I will say here that a lot of the time it has less to do with the actual job that you work in and more to do with the company that you work for or sometimes even the industry that you work in as well. It's also extremely subjective. There's so many different things that can change your satisfaction. It could be the people that you work with, the area that the job is in for instance, is it in a big city or is it in the middle of nowhere. So satisfaction is extremely subjective. For one person it could be 10 out of 10 and for another person the same exact job could be one out of 10. But with that being said I'm gonna give this one a score of eight out of 10. Next we're gonna be talking about demand and when it comes to demand this is usually the most important metric because demand tends to influence everything else. If there are skills that you learn with your degree that are high in demand, people will tend to pay you more, you'll have a lot more options, you can live in more places. Businesses will also tend to treat you a lot better so you're gonna have a lot more opportunity to move up in the business. You might get a lot of benefits and perks. So usually demand is the most important thing but it can get a little bit weird when you talk about government jobs. A lot of the time when it comes to government jobs they'll hire people even though there's not a lot of demand for that skill on the open market. And like I mentioned before this is a degree that will probably lead quite a few people to go into a government job. But with that being said when it comes to the demand police officers are growing at about 5% over the next 10 years which is a little bit faster than average. And probation officers or correctional treatment specialists are growing at 4% which is about average. So one thing that I like to talk about on this channel sometimes is if you get a degree where there's not a lot of demand for the skill on the open market sometimes it's a good idea to look into government related jobs. Now with that being said one test that I like to do this isn't a perfect test by any means but it can tell you some really important things is I'll look on either monster.com or indeed.com and type in the degree name. So for instance when you type in the keyword criminal justice degree you'll see that 9,600 jobs pop up. You can compare that to a degree that's high in demand like computer science where 141,000 pop up or one that's low in demand like anthropology where 829 jobs pop up. And you see that it's actually not that bad. It's higher than average when it comes to the number of people who have that as a keyword in the job description. Now with that being said the big issue here and this is something that I mentioned before and it's kind of a red flag to look out for with a lot of different degrees is that a lot of the jobs you can go into don't actually require a criminal justice degree. So when you look at a lot of these different job descriptions and you click on them you'll see that criminal justice degree is listed there but it's not a requirement. Many of them you can apply for with just a high school diploma and if they do require a degree you can get into it with just about any degree out there. So that's kind of a big issue and because of that I'm gonna have to give this one a six out of 10 when it comes to demand. Next we're gonna be talking about X factors and this is basically anything that we didn't mention before. So a lot of the time I'll talk about how likely something is to be automated or outsourced and I like to go into how valuable the skills are as well as how flexible the degree is in general. Now like I mentioned before the Census Bureau says that social science degree graduates are gonna make slightly above average at $2.5 million over a lifetime which the average is around 2.4 million and that's gonna vary quite a bit depending on what career path that you end up going into. So for instance if you want to become a manager with a social science degree they make on average 3.4 million over a lifetime which is a lot more. So if you're able to combine your social science degree skill set with a leadership kind of management skill set you can make quite a bit of money. But with that being said when it comes to how much the market values these skills the skill of criminal justice it's not very much unfortunately. So according to Zippercruiter software engineering is valued at 88 out of 100 industrial sewing is eight out of 100 which is really low and criminal justice comes in at 15. So it's definitely on the lower side and that's not to say the skill of criminal justice doesn't have value this is more a gauge of how much demand there is on the open market at this particular time in history for this skill set. This is actually pretty common for a lot of government related jobs where there's not a lot of demand for it because the government is already taking care of it. And you can see why there's such an imbalance here because it's one of the most popular degrees lots of people graduate with it every year but unfortunately there's not all that many jobs out there for people who have that particular skill set that the major teaches. Like I mentioned before there's tons of jobs out there that don't require a criminal justice degree so you're competing against just about anybody out there who has a degree or sometimes people who just have a high school diploma. Now when it comes to the likelihood of automation or outsourcing this is where the degree really shines. So a lot of these social science related degrees are never going to be outsourced because robots simply will never be able to have the soft skills that social sciences teach. So for instance there's only a 1% chance that forensic science technicians are going to be automated. However weirdly there's a 34% chance that detectives and criminal investigators are going to get automated according to this study. That's probably because we have all this new technology that's popping out with cameras everywhere and all kinds of stuff like that. And so they don't need as many detectives to do the same job. Now going back to my point about soft skills that's where a lot of these social science degrees really shine. So they might not directly lead to you making a lot of money. There's not a lot of jobs out there for many of these social science degrees but they'll teach you skills that will end up indirectly helping you out in many areas of your life including financially. Things like communication, giving a speech, formulating an argument. These are things that you're going to learn in spades with a lot of these social science degrees. But with that being said, I have to be fair and objective here and when it comes to the numbers there's clearly an imbalance here between the people who graduate with this degree and the actual need on the market. And so I'm going to have to give this one a five out of 10 when it comes to X factors. So some of the pros here are that it's going to have good job satisfaction. A lot of the time you're going to end up working in government jobs which depending on your personality might be really good for you. There's also a relatively low chance of automation. We're always going to have police and detectives out there. Some of the cons here are the pay is going to be relatively low and this is kind of just government jobs in general. The pay does tend to be kind of low but they have pretty good benefits. Some of the cons are that there might be some occupational hazards. So obviously if you're a police officer you're going to be putting your life on the line and many of the occupations don't actually need a degree and the ones that do need a degree specifically they usually don't need a criminal justice degree. So overall I'm going to give this one a score of 6.375 out of 10. I think it's very important that you do your research if you want to go for this major. A lot of the time if you do your research you're going to find that you don't actually need to get a college degree in many cases and specifically a criminal justice degree in order to get into the career path that you were looking into. If you do your research and you talk to people in that career path and you ask them hey is a college degree going to help me and they tell you yes it will help you if you want to try to go for this then by all means you should definitely go for the degree. And also keep in mind that this is extremely subjective for one person this might be at a 10 out of 10 and for another person it might be a one out of 10. If you want more help doing research on different college degrees I've created a version 1.1 of the college degree ranker down in the description below. It is going to be through a pay wall it's going to be Patreon. However if you just want to wait around I'll probably get to all of the degrees and talk about them in videos. But with that being said if you haven't done it already go ahead and gently tap the like button hit the subscribe button ring the notification bell comment down below any thoughts, comments, criticisms definitely share the video that's the best thing you could possibly do. And then before you leave check out my other videos right here I made them just for you.