What Your Graduate Advisor Never Told You About the Criminology Job Market
Unlike some other social sciences, criminology and criminal justice consistently produce job openings. But not all positions are created equal, and where you land can affect your career and your mental health in ways your graduate advisor never mentioned. And many young criminologists enter their first position with unrealistic expectations about just about everything. Whether you are still in graduate school or already a few years into a job that isn’t quite what you expected, the same blind spots apply.
Start with the basic pecking order. Community colleges sit at the bottom, R1 universities at the top, with regional teaching institutions somewhere in the middle. Each tier comes with its own culture, expectations, and daily grind.
Community colleges expect lots of face-to-face interaction with students. Creativity in the classroom is limited, students are often indifferent to the subject matter, and your colleagues are more likely to be current or former practitioners than scholars interested in academic research.
At the R1 end, the pressure is on grant-funded research, longitudinal data collection, and the methodologically rigorous but sometimes soul-numbing work that may look great on a vita but reads like advanced calculus.
Regional teaching universities sit in the middle and are genuinely fine, possibly even quite good, depending on what you want from academic life. The catch is that almost all junior faculty there seem to be pining for something better.
And there’s another divide few people mention in graduate school, and that is how much of a “cop shop” criminology and criminal justice departments are. The cop shops (a term that is frequently used dismissively) primarily focus on training future practitioners, police officers, corrections workers, and probation officers. The job ad won’t tell you which one you’re applying to. If you don’t figure this out during your in-person interview, when faculty are typically on their best behavior, you’ll recognize it during your first faculty meeting when someone suggests the department needs more “practical” courses, and one third of the room nods enthusiastically while another third rolls their eyes, and the balance tries to sustain their best poker face.
The fit problem in criminology has a particular shape. The field draws from two very different pipelines: practitioners who tend to gravitate toward teaching and are generally comfortable there, and R1 graduates trained as researchers who take positions at regional universities or community colleges, telling themselves they’ll carve out time for scholarship.
Some colleagues (or administrators) may also expect (or encourage) you to initiate or collaborate on research projects with local criminal justice agencies or to guest lecture at events sponsored by them. If you’re a critical criminologist who studies police violence or mass incarceration, this creates awkward dynamics. You’re supposed to maintain town-gown relationships with institutions you critique in your research. Similarly, it’s difficult to be a scholar who critiques the carceral state while also serving on the committee that selects law enforcement officers for departmental scholarships.
The criminology-specific wrinkle is this: your institution sits next to police departments, courts, correctional facilities, and social service agencies that could generate meaningful research partnerships. But you don’t pursue them because you’re already planning your exit and don’t want to start something you might not finish. So the data goes uncollected, the relationships go unbuilt, and the publications don’t materialize, which makes the exit harder, not easier.
If you’re navigating any of this, Letters to a Young Criminologist was written for you.
Photographer: Changbok Ko
