The Recruitment Crisis in Policing: The Downstream Effect of Exceptional Declines in Criminal Justice Student Enrollment

The crisis in police recruitment and retention of qualified applicants is one of the most significant issues facing law enforcement in the 2020s. Colleges have been desirable and important recruitment sites for qualified law enforcement candidates because criminal justice (CRJ)programs have flourished over the past 20 years, providing a robust pool of potential applicants. The COVID-19 pandemic had a major impact on enrollment, including these CRJ programs. It has been conjectured that CRJ undergraduate programs faced another challenge: the climate of social unrest which developed because of George Floyd’s death from the inappropriate use of police force. This study aimed to demonstrate whether the declines in CRJ major enrollment were greater from those of other majors, which might speak to similar socio-political variables affecting policing recruitment challenges and a potential downstream effect on recruiting. Using descriptive analyses through a series of ANOVA and t-test comparisons across the top dozen programs at the City University of New York, the fourth largest university system in the U.S. from 2019-2022, this study finds that criminal justice programs lost a larger proportion of students than othermajors. These losses were more substantial in community college associate degrees than in senior college bachelor’s degrees. within the CRJ major, we found minimal demographic differences in declines across sex/gender and racial/ethnic lines. The findings are important because they aim to separate general pandemic effects from other social effects for criminal justice programs, which in turn can affect the pipeline for recruitment of college-educated officers for police.