Alumni Profile: Ashley Schroeder
Halfway through Ashley Schroeder’s first season on the women’s basketball team at Hilbert College, her coaches named her point guard. It’s a position that involves directing plays for the rest of the team. For a first-year student, that could be more than a bit intimidating.
“Sometimes, in the heat of the game, I had to yell at a senior to get into the right position,” Schroeder says. “Afterwards, I was mortified. But I was praised for it by my coach. She said, ‘We love to see that you can take charge like that.’”
Her experience on the team, she found, also helped her on her academic path at Hilbert, where she was pursuing a master’s degree in criminal justice administration.
“It gave me a lot of confidence to take charge in other roles,” she says. “In a group project, I’m going to make sure that I know what I’m talking about in every aspect of criminal justice. I like to be well researched in the same way that I need to be for a game.”
Interest in “Criminal Minds”
Even as a young girl in Caledonia, Minnesota, Schroeder liked to take the initiative. She would sneak out of her bedroom and peek from behind a couch when her mother watched “Criminal Minds,” her favorite TV show.
The series followed an FBI unit that analyzed the behavior of unknown suspects to construct profiles. Schroeder was fascinated, and aspired to do the same.
Her ambition changed in high school, when she worked as a volunteer with the local police department. She found herself dismayed by some of the attitudes the police officers had about civilians. That experience awakened an interest in criminal justice reform in her.
“I started seeing the flaws in the system,” she says. “The more I learned, the more I felt that what we’re doing now doesn’t make sense. But my mentality was, ‘How can I change things? What can we do to make things better?’”
At the same time, she was pursuing her other passion: basketball. She’d started playing in fourth grade, inspired by her hoops-playing sister, who was two years older.
When Schroeder started thinking about college, she wanted to find a school that was strong in both criminal justice and women’s basketball. Those criteria led her to Hilbert.
Classrooms and Courts
Hilbert gave Schroeder an opportunity to accelerate her studies. The school’s 4+1 program allowed her to take graduate courses during her senior year. After earning her bachelor’s in criminal justice, she only had to take another year of courses to earn a master’s in criminal justice administration.
One of her favorite courses was Advanced Criminological Theory, which took her back to her days watching “Criminal Minds.” Another was Ethics in Criminal Justice, in which she often debated with the professor about ethical gray areas.
“He’d say, ‘I love that you disagree with me,’” she says. “But it really brought into my mind that there are a lot of things that are allowed legally—or aren't allowed legally—that don't make sense.”
Meanwhile, Schroeder was a star on the Hilbert Hawks basketball team. She was named the Allegheny Mountain Collegiate Conference women's basketball player of the week 15 times. In three years, she scored more than 1,000 points.
She sees parallels between basketball and criminal justice work. On the court, she had to know the rules inside and out and be able to recall them in a split second.
“In basketball, being wrong loses you points, loses you games,” she says. “It’s a high-stress, high-pressure environment where you’ve got a time limit. It makes doing high-pressure things in real life a lot easier—things like going into criminal justice.”
Investigating the Police
For Schroeder, the ultimate test of her leadership skills was completing her master’s thesis. She recruited both police and fellow criminal justice students to take a survey on a sensitive subject: myths about rape victims.
In police ride-alongs back home, she had been upset to hear officers respond to rape reports by asking what the victim was wearing or whether they were drunk. Schroeder says, “Essentially, they’re shifting the blame onto the victim, while simultaneously taking the blame off of the perpetrator.”
She wondered how such attitudes came about. Did police work attract people who already believed rape myths, or did the work itself foster them? With support from her professors, she surveyed 80 students regarding four common myths.
Local police officers were a greater challenge. By talking to several in person and enlisting the help of supervisors, she collected 30 responses—just enough to get statistically significant results.
She found that police officers were significantly more likely than students to accept two of the myths: that the victim had asked for it or that the victim was lying. She concluded that their work environments did indeed promote such beliefs. The results fortified her resolve to reform the system.
Schroeder earned her master’s degree in May 2023. Her next move will be to Washington, D.C., where she’ll pursue a PhD in justice, law and criminology at American University. She hopes to eventually participate in drafting laws and regulations, perhaps on Capitol Hill.
One policy interest of hers is reallocating public safety funding, to take police officers out of situations that might be better handled by mental health or social workers. She also hopes to promote alternative ways for victims to report sexual assaults to the criminal justice system.
Schroeder acknowledges how her criminal justice career goals have changed over the years. “I didn't want to be anywhere near politics,” she says of her younger self. “But the more I learned, the more I realized how intertwined everything was. If I wanted to get anything done, I would have to be a part of it.”
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