If you plan on getting your bachelor's degree in geography & cartography, you won't be alone since the degree program is ranked #86 in the country in terms of popularity. As a result, there are many college that offer the degree, making your choice of school a hard one.
College Factual looked at 14 colleges and universities when compiling its 2025 Best Geography & Cartography Bachelor's Degree Schools in California ranking. When you put them all together, these colleges and universities awarded 506 bachelor's degrees in geography & cartography during the 2022-2023 academic year.
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Choosing a Great Geography & Cartography School for Your Bachelor's Degree
Your choice of geography & cartography for getting your bachelor's degree school matters. Important measures of a quality geography 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 take this into account 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 much a school focuses on geography & cartography students vs. other majors.
Major Demand - The number of geography & cartography 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 much debt geography & cartography students go into to obtain their bachelor's degree and how well they are able to pay back that debt.
Accreditation - Whether a school is regionally accredited and/or accredited by a recognized geography & cartography related body.
Our full ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best colleges for geography & cartography students working on their bachelor's degree.
Since the program you select can have a significant impact on your future, we've developed a number of rankings, including this Best Geography & Cartography Bachelor's Degree Schools in California list, to help you choose the best school for you.
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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It is difficult to beat University of California - Los Angeles if you wish to pursue a bachelor's degree in geography & cartography. UCLA is a fairly large public university located in the large city of Los Angeles.
Bachelor's recipients from the geography & cartography major at University of California - Los Angeles make $2,263 more than the standard college grad with the same degree shortly after graduation.
University of California - Santa Barbara is one of the best schools in the country for getting a bachelor's degree in geography & cartography. UCSB is a very large public university located in the medium-sized suburb of Santa Barbara.
Bachelor's recipients from the geography & cartography degree program at University of California - Santa Barbara get $2,885 above the average graduate with the same degree when they enter the workforce.
San Diego State University is one of the best schools in the United States for getting a bachelor's degree in geography & cartography. Located in the city of San Diego, SDSU is a public university with a fairly large student population.
Geography & Cartography bachelor's degree recipients from San Diego State University get an earnings boost of approximately $4,135 over the typical earnings of geography & cartography majors.
Sac State is a very large public university located in the city of Sacramento.
Those geography & cartography students who get their bachelor's degree from California State University - Sacramento receive $13,714 more than the average geography graduate.
Located in the suburb of Rohnert Park, SSU is a public university with a medium-sized student population.
Geography & Cartography bachelor's degree recipients from Sonoma State University earn a boost of approximately $6,101 above the average earnings of geography & cartography graduates.
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).
Your choice of geography & cartography for getting your bachelor's degree school matters. Important measures of a quality geography program can vary widely even among the top schools. To make it into this list, a school must excel in the following areas.
