Cities hope to attract more police officers by cutting education requirements

USA Today

3 days ago

Some cities hope that relaxing education hiring standards may solve lingering staffing shortages. Is that a good idea?
The Dallas Police Department had been shrinking for years, losing more officers than they hired ‒ and competition for recruits was fierce.
Then the hiring woes got even more dire in the fall of 2024, when voters passed a proposition that required the force have at least 4,000 officers, hundreds more than it had even at its peak in 2010.
So the department tried a new recruiting strategy: Make it easier to hire by dropping the requirement that applicants have college credits under their belt.
Dallas isn't alone. It's among a number cities to relax college education hiring requirements for officers, a yearslong trend that includes Chicago, Memphis, Louisville, and New Orleans.
The changes bring the cities back in alignment with much of the nation. More than 80% - of law enforcement agencies only require a high school diploma to be hired, according to a 2017 survey of nearly 1,000 departments nationwide.
'In a perfect world, would you want police officers to be college educated? Absolutely, but this is where policing is now,' said Chuck Wexler, executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum. 'There simply is more demand for police officers - for qualified police officers - than there is a supply.'
Research has found there are some benefits to stricter standards: college-educated officers tend to use less force, have fewer complaints against them and write better reports. But some police researchers say these findings aren't definitive and relaxing education requirements can make the job accessible to more Americans amid the rising cost of college.
In the weeks since the Dallas police made the change, applications have begun to roll in from people who previously wouldn't have been able to become a police officer, according to Luis Mata, a spokesperson for the department. Recruits must still pass a civil service test, physical exam, background checks as well as psychological and medical evaluations before they can enter the 10-month-long police academy.
'I've been asked this question, 'does education have any sort of bearing on whether somebody is going to be successful through your academy?'' said Mata. 'And I would say that we have people with master's degrees, bachelor's degrees and associate's that fail out of our academy. It's really about applying yourself.'
Why are police changing education requirements?
Law enforcement officials say they are trying new recruitment strategies like dropping education requirements in part due to nationwide shortages.
Federal officials have said law enforcement faced a "historic crisis in recruiting and retaining" officers because of a tight labor market during the pandemic and protests over high profile police killings, though recent data suggests the crisis may be easing.
A few locations have reexamined their education requirements in 2025, including:
'I still believe that somebody with a high school diploma should be able to access the occupation because right now, with the recruiting pool, the amount of candidates that we actually have available to us is not as big as it used to be back in the days,' said Brian Marvel, president of the Peace Officers Research Association of California, a federation of associations that represents more than 83,000 officers in the state.
Does college education help police officers?
Experts have been calling for a better educated police force for decades, including two federal commissions that raised the issue in the 1930s and 1960s.
Research has found education may improve officers' interactions with the public. College-educated officers use force less often and have less disciplinary action taken against them than their peers without a degree, a 2007 study published in Criminal Justice and Behavior found. This may be particularly important for officers serving minority communities.
College exposes students to people from various backgrounds, allowing them to develop "a greater appreciation and compassion for others," said one 2023 paperon the value of college education for police officers, which was published in the journal Research in Higher Education.
College-educated officers have also been found to be better report writers, which 'could translate into better investigations, higher court case filings, fewer evidentiary constitutional challenges, fewer false confessions or wrongful convictions, and/or more successful prosecution,' according to a 2017 report on the role of higher education in policing.
"On the whole, more research indicates positive effects than no correlation or negative consequences," the report said.
But the evidence that education can make you a better police officer isn't definitive, according to both the study and Eugene A. Paoline III, a professor of criminal justice at the University of Central Florida.
"Experience is also something that matters in police behavior and their attitudes," he said. "And we find that the same way that college-educated people might use less force, more experienced people use less force because they find alternate ways to handle situations."
Paoline said his research has also found some drawbacks, including that officers with higher education levels are less satisfied with their job.
Education requirements also create an additional barrier for certain groups, including those who can't afford college, he said. Though the share of Americans with bachelor's degree has been rising, Hispanic and Black adults were more likely than their White counterparts to say cost is a major reason they didn't complete a four-year degree, according to the Pew Research Center.
'I am a fan of police having a college experience, college degree,' he said. 'At the same time, I'm saying, if you don't have an education requirement, it's not going to be harmful. It's not going to be a total detriment to the field.'
Does lowering education standards solve staffing shortages?
Several departments have seen a surge in applications after nixing college education requirements, but there are some signs that loosening standards doesn't necessarily solve staffing problems.
Both Wexler and Paoline said they couldn't point to examples of a department hiring more people after removing education requirements.
In the month after the Philadelphia Police Department dropped its requirement that recruits have at least two years of college credit under their belt in 2016, applications skyrocketed to more than 5,700, up from a high of less than 2,000 in previous years' application drives, according to Captain John Walker.
'I think it just was because people who couldn't apply before … just decided they wanted to be police officers,' said Walker.
But Philly police staffing stayed flat in 2016 at 96% and dipped slightly the following year, according to Walker.
'Now we sit at 82% staffing,' Walker said.
Applications to the New Orleans Police Department rose after they jettisoned a college education requirement ten years ago, spiking to a high of 7,440 in 2017, according to city data. But the department continued to hire around 100 people each year and far fewer after 2020.
Even without the education requirement, recruitment has remained a challenge according to Matthew Stone, of the New Orleans Police and Justice Foundation.
'The general goal is to increase the amount into the top of that funnel, and this is what we were tasked with over the last 10 years, which is marketing the applications,' he said.