Criminal Justice Majors

    This section profiles current undergraduate criminal justice majors at Temple University.

 How Many

       Since the Fall of 2000, criminal justice has been the  second most popular major in the College of Liberal Arts. That remained true in the Fall of 2003.[1] Criminal justice undergraduate majors totaled 715 compared to Psychology's 985. Political Science continued to rank third with about 420 majors. The total number of declared majors for social science departments with over 200 majors is shown below.

     Over the past four academic years,  the fraction of social science majors in the College of Liberal Arts majoring in Criminal Justice has remained almost constant, increasing only very slightly from 23.7% in the Fall of 2000 to 24.2% in the Fall of 2002 to 24.6% in the Fall of 2003. Psychology continues to produce about one out of every three social science majors in CLA.

Major Productivity Per Presidential Faculty

    This increased major load translates to 47.7 majors "produced" by each filled Presidential line.  Compared to the 36.9 majors "produced" by 15 filled Presidential faculty lines for the year before, this represents a 29.3% increase in major "production" per filled Presidential faculty line compared to the year preceding.   

Features of Majors

 Some notable features of our majors as of the spring of 2004 are as follows:  

• As we go from first year to seniors, the fraction of majors by year is: 22%, 22%, 30% and 26%. Compared to the numbers for last year (16%, 22%, 30%, 32%), this represents slightly more majors in the first year, and slightly fewer in the senior year.[2]

• Women comprise 54% of our majors, down slightly from their proportion in last year's majors (56%)

• Full-time students make up 83% of our majors, down slightly from 87% of last year's majors.

• Most of our majors are on main campus (81%); about 100 majors or 14% declared on the Ambler campus.

Grades by Students

     Majors' GPAs for the last three years appear in the table below. By the end of the Fall 2003 semester, compared to two years earlier, majors' GPAs were slightly higher, with a slightly higher fraction of GPAs in the A range (13% up from 9%). There was a slight drop in GPAs in the B range (from 31% to 29%), and the fraction with extremely low GPAs, C- or lower, grew slightly to around 6 - 7 %.

Given the dramatic increase in our number of majors in the last two years, these figures our heartening. They suggest that major quality is holding steady despite the increasing volume. Of course,  since we do not have comparable college-wide data on grade distributions, we don't know how these patterns compare to other majors or the college as a whole.

Student Reactions

    Starting in the Spring of 1996, and continuing every other spring, we have surveyed all students in our Main and Ambler courses during a two day period in April. We ask all students about satisfaction with quality of instruction. We ask criminal justice majors about satisfaction with their major overall, and with different components of the major.

    Data from the 2002 survey showed majors continued to be quite satisfied with their major. For 2002, 90% of majors were at least "somewhat satisfied" with the major; 79% were either "satisfied", "very satisfied" or "completely satisfied." 52% were at least "very satisfied" with their major. Analyses suggest a linear trend of slightly but significantly increasing satisfaction over the multiple waves of the majors' survey.[3]

    Turning to all students' satisfaction with quality of instruction, 91% of all surveyed students were at least somewhat satisfied with the quality of instruction in the criminal justice courses they had taken or were currently taking. 77% were either "satisfied", "very satisfied", or "completely satisfied" with quality of instruction. Looking at all waves of the surveys, data showed no significant differences between any of the waves on undergraduates' satisfaction with their criminal justice courses. For each year, the average was above 6.0, corresponding to a better than  "satisfied" average rating.

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[1] These are "official" Temple University number from the university website. Office of Student Information Systems. "Temple University Fall 2003 Student Profile: College of Liberal Arts." [online: http://www.temple.edu/factbook/profile03/libprofile.html; retrieved 3/09/04]
[2] This number joins seniors and "high seniors".
[3] For the satisfaction questions, the response categories were completely dissatisfied (0) / very dissatisfied (1) / dissatisfied (2) / somewhat dissatisfied (3) / neither (4) / somewhat satisfied (5) / satisfied (6) / very satisfied (7) / completely satisfied (8) .