Greenwich University, MA Criminology

Greenwich University's MA in Criminology is taught in a beautiful setting, but is a poorly thought-out course, which should be fascinating, but ends up being frustrating.

The subject matter is fascinating to everybody - most people have an opinion on crime and criminal behaviour, and it is always a subject that leads to heated debate. The college offers 'International Criminology' which is useful in todays climate and especially attractive to the multi-cultural student group that the college is likely to appeal to. The course will appeal to a wide range of mostly public sector people who may wish to enter or to further careers in probation social work, youth work and so-on. The college is set within the old naval college - beautiful building set next to the river Thames.

Unfortunately the course is poorly structured: Surprisingly, there is little in the way of modern criminology. The course begins with an outline of the historical context of criminology, and then options can be chosen from subjects such as 'terrorism and the state', or 'penality'. Students also study research methods in criminology and take a dissertation. The number of modules that can be take is quite limited in comparison to other post-graduate courses - there is just one module per term for part-time student and two per term for full time students. I believe that most post-graduate students will be used to double this amount. Unfortunately there is is also two essays per topic instead of the usual one - so that instead of having an essay per topic there are two per topic, which means that assignments can become repetitive. There is little in the way of allowance for part-time students, as there appears to have been no special measures taken to accomodate their needs - for example part-time students take a research topic at the end of the first year - although they have no research to complete until the end of the second year (they take the research with the full time students). I would also advise that prospective students do not take the prospectus too seriously - as the subjects advertised are not always taught; 17 subjects were advertised in the '05-06 prospectus, whilst only 7 were actually taught and appeared in the course.