Understanding the Career Aspirations of Australian Criminology Students

A desire to make a difference is one of the most common motivations for criminology students when explaining their choice of degree. A growing body of scholarship examines how this informs students’ career aspirations, but rarely by tapping into their moral and crime attribution beliefs. This paper draws on a survey of 430 criminology students enrolled at Australian universities to explore how moral foundations and beliefs about crime attribution predict four aspirational careers, namely, law enforcement, public service, victim advocacy, and policy analysis. A series of binary regression analyses revealed that the “binding” moral foundations variable (comprising loyalty, authority, and purity moral foundations) was positively associated with consideration of a career in law enforcement, whereas the “individualising” moral foundations variable (comprising care and justice foundations) was negatively associated. However, contra our expectations, punitiveness was negatively associated with consideration of careers in both law enforcement and policy analysis. While respondent gender was not a predictor of interest in careers in law enforcement and victim advocacy, men had significantly higher log odds of considering a career in the public service or policy analysis than women or gender-diverse students.