When it comes to popularity, a bachelor's degree in urban & regional planning sits in the middle of the road, ranking #178 out of 363 majors in the country. So, it might take a little more work to find colleges and universities that offer the degree program.
College Factual looked at 5 colleges and universities when compiling its 2025 Best Urban & Regional Planning Bachelor's Degree Schools in the Southwest Region ranking. When you put them all together, these colleges and universities awarded 268 bachelor's degrees in urban & regional planning during the 2022-2023 academic year.
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Choosing a Great Urban & Regional Planning School for Your Bachelor's Degree
The urban planning bachelor's degree program you select can have a big impact on your future. Important measures of a quality urban planning program can vary widely even among the top schools. To make it into this list, a school must excel in the following areas.
A Great Overall School
The overall quality of a bachelor's degree school is important to ensure a good education, not just how well they do in a particular major. To account for this we include a school's overall Best Colleges ranking which itself looks at a combination of various factors like degree completion, educational resources, student body caliber and post-graduation earnings for the school as a whole.
Early-Career Earnings
One measure we use to determine the quality of a school is to look at the average salary of bachelor's graduates during the early years of their career. That is, everyone wants their bachelor's degree to be worth something, and salaries are one measure of determining that.
Other Factors We Consider
The metrics below are just some of the other metrics that we use to determine our rankings.
Major Focus - How many resources a school devotes to urban & regional planning students as compared to other majors.
Major Demand - The number of urban & regional planning students who choose to seek a bachelor's degree at the school.
Educational Resources - How many resources are allocated to students. These resources may include educational expenditures per student, number of students per instructor, and graduation rate among other things.
Student Debt - How easy is it for urban & regional planning to pay back their student loans after receiving their bachelor's degree.
Accreditation - Whether a school is regionally accredited and/or accredited by a recognized urban & regional planning related body.
Our full ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best colleges for urban & regional planning students working on their bachelor's degree.
More Ways to Rank Urban & Regional Planning Schools
The urban planning school you choose to invest your time and money in matters. To help you make the decision that is right for you, we've developed a number of major-specific rankings, including this list of the Best Urban & Regional Planning Bachelor's Degree Schools in the Southwest Region.
In addition to our rankings, you can take two colleges and compare them based on the criteria that matters most to you in our unique tool, College Combat.
Test it out when you get a chance! You may also want to bookmark the link and share it with others who are trying to make the college decision.
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Any student who is interested in a bachelor's degree in urban & regional planning needs to check out Texas A&M University - College Station. Texas A&M College Station is a very large public university located in the medium-sized city of College Station.
Those urban & regional planning students who get their bachelor's degree from Texas A&M University - College Station receive $4,224 more than the average urban planning graduate.
Any student pursuing a degree in a bachelor's degree in urban & regional planning needs to look into University of Arizona. University of Arizona is a fairly large public university located in the city of Tucson.
After graduating, urban planning bachelor's recipients typically earn about $40,037 in their early careers.
It is hard to beat Arizona State University - Tempe if you want to pursue a bachelor's degree in urban & regional planning. Located in the city of Tempe, ASU - Tempe is a public university with a fairly large student population.
Bachelor's students who receive their degree from the urban planning program earn about $46,954 in their early career salary.
Any student pursuing a degree in a bachelor's degree in urban & regional planning needs to look into Arizona State University - Skysong. ASU - Skysong is a fairly large public university located in the city of Scottsdale.
Bachelor's students who receive their degree from the urban planning program make about $46,954 for their early career.
The bars on the spread charts above show the distribution of the schools on this list +/- one standard deviation from the mean.
The Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), a branch of the U.S. Department of Education (DOE) serves as the core of the rest of our data about colleges.
Some other college data, including much of the graduate earnings data, comes from the U.S. Department of Education’s (College Scorecard).
The urban planning bachelor's degree program you select can have a big impact on your future. Important measures of a quality urban planning program can vary widely even among the top schools. To make it into this list, a school must excel in the following areas.
