Florida State University (FSU) offers one of the top graduate criminology programs in the nation. Ranked No. 7 by "U.S. News & World Report" in 2009, the FSU criminology department offers a Ph.D. in the field that allows students an opportunity to pursue advanced cutting-edge research in the field through the department's Center for Criminology and Public Policy Research.
Degree requirements vary among students and their area of emphasis, but all students are required to take a professional development course as part of their curriculum. As part of the program students can also pursue joint-degrees at the master's level in the fields of social work or public administration. Courses include various seminars in theoretical criminology, victimology, applied statistics, prevention and treatment of crime, penology and race, ethnicity, crime and social justice.
College of Criminology and Criminal Justice
Hecht House
634 West Call Street
Tallahassee, FL 32306
850-644-4050
criminology.fsu.edu
A criminology Ph.D. is offered through the Department of Criminology at the University of Pennsylvania. The Penn program is an interdisciplinary program that relies heavily on the insights gained from other fields such as sociology, public health and psychology. As part of the program, students must take core courses in applied statistics, criminology theory and criminology and public policy. Areas of study covered by the Penn criminology program include quantitative methods, constitutional criminal procedure, basic demographic methods, evidence-based crime prevention, fatal violence in the United States, crime and human development and biosocial criminology.
Department of Criminology
University of Pennsylvania
McNeil Building, Suite 483
3718 Locust Walk
Philadelphia, PA 19104
215-573-9097
crim.upenn.edu
The University of Southern Florida (USF) also offers a Ph.D in the field of criminology. The degree program at USF is a 90-credit-hour program. Of these 90 hours, 21 hours include core courses in the fields of quantitative analysis, research methods, theoretical approaches to criminal behavior, evaluation research methods in criminology and qualitative research methods.
Students already holding the Master of Arts degree in the field can transfer up to 33 hours in order to eliminate some of the additional course work. Elective courses are offered in various fields such as crime analysis, capital punishment, environmental law, drug ethnography, the political economy of crime and justice and current issues in corrections.
University of Southern Florida
Criminology Department
4202 East Fowler Avenue
SOC107
Tampa, FL 33620
813-974-7197
criminology.usf.edu