Academic Program Review

ACJS voted to adopt quality standards for criminal justice higher education programs in 2005. Many programs at colleges and universities have used these standards as benchmarks for program reviews. Every academic program must undergo periodic external review as required by either the state and/or accrediting-agency (every 5, 7, or 10 years). Rather than having external parties conduct reviews according to unknown standards, ACJS stepped into this space in 2005. The Standards themselves remain quite relevant, and a periodic review of them recently occurred, when the ACJS Academic Review Committee completed an update to the standards, focusing primarily on online course delivery and evolving library standards.

The ACJS Executive Board voted in 2018 to discontinue its academic program “Certification” efforts, but individual academic programs at the Associates, Bachelors, and Masters levels continue to need external reviews. Consequently, ACJS replaced the Certification process with the ACJS Program Endorsement. The ACJS Academic Review Committee maintains a list of certified academic reviewers from past ACJS trainings who can serve as external reviewers using the ACJS Standards as benchmarks for their site visit. There remains a significant need in our field to ensure that criminal justice and criminology programs are able to distinguish themselves in the competitive landscape of higher education by demonstrating their adherence to rigorous academic standards.

ACJS is the only national organization with a specific focus on criminal justice education. Criminal justice programs more than ever need to differentiate themselves from the growing groups of less academically rigorous, adjunct-laden, and for-profit programs around the country taught by under-qualified faculty. The current situation is important to consider when some of the degree programs with which you now compete spend more money on marketing than they do on instruction. Maintaining high academic quality standards will distinguish your program from theirs, and an external review guided by the ACJS quality standards should point to that distinction.

We encourage you to review the updated ACJS Quality Standards and note that they emphasize that criminal justice is a broad-spectrum field with specific substantive specialties and cognates important for all graduates to understand. Unfortunately, the scope and importance of our field is sometimes not recognized by university administrators. The ACJS Standards offer benchmarks around teaching, faculty, students, and administration that make it clear if programs are over-enrolled and under-resourced, they cannot meet the standards set by your peers in the field (as reflected in the ACJS Standards). Therefore, the Standards can be useful in defending resource requests and in responding to calls for external review.

Please direct any inquiries about the Standards or external reviews to the chair of the ACJS Academic Review Committee Chair Dr. Christine Tartaro (Christine.Tartaro@Stockton.edu).