a bachelor's degree in geography & cartography is more popular than many other degrees. In fact, it ranks #86 out of 363 on popularity of all such degrees in the nation. This means you won't have too much trouble finding schools that offer the degree.
For its 2025 ranking, College Factual looked at 7 schools in Virginia to determine which ones were the best for geography & cartography students pursuing a bachelor's degree. When you put them all together, these colleges and universities awarded 173 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
The geography bachelor's degree program you select can have a big impact on your future. This section explores some of the factors we include in our ranking and how much they vary depending on the school you select. When choosing a school we recommend considering some of the following factors:
Quality Overall Is Important
A school that excels in educating for a particular major and degree level must be a great school overall as well. To make it into this list a school must rank well in our overall Best Colleges ranking. This ranking considered factors such as graduation rates, overall graduate earnings and other educational resources to identify great colleges and universities.
Average Earnings
To determine the overall quality of a graduate school, one factor we look at is the average early-career salary of those receiving their bachelor's degree from the school. This is because one of the main reasons people pursue their bachelor's degree is to enable themselves to find better-paying positions.
Other Factors We Consider
In addition to the above, you should consider some of the following factors:
Major Focus - How many resources a school devotes to geography & cartography students as compared to other majors.
Major Demand - How many other geography & cartography students want to attend this school to pursue a bachelor's degree.
Educational Resources - The amount of money and other resources allocated to students while they are pursuing their degree. These resources include such things as number of students per instructor and education expenditures per student.
Student Debt - How easy is it for geography & cartography 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 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.
The geography 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 Geography & Cartography Bachelor's Degree Schools in Virginia.
In addition to College Factual's rankings, you may want to take a look at College Combat, our unique tool that lets you pit your favorite schools head-to-head and compare how they rate on factors that most interest you.
When you have some time, check it out - you may want to bookmark the link so you don't forget it.
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It is difficult to beat Virginia Tech if you want to pursue a bachelor's degree in geography & cartography. Located in the city of Blacksburg, Virginia Tech is a public school with a very large student population.
Bachelor's graduates who receive their degree from the geography program earn an average of $39,328 in the first couple years of working.
Every student pursuing a degree in a bachelor's degree in geography & cartography needs to check out James Madison University. JMU is a fairly large public university located in the small city of Harrisonburg.
Bachelor's graduates who receive their degree from the geography program make an average of $45,094 in the first couple years of their career.
George Mason University is one of the best schools in the United States for getting a bachelor's degree in geography & cartography. GMU is a very large public university located in the large suburb of Fairfax.
Those geography & cartography students who get their bachelor's degree from George Mason University earn $4,905 more than the typical geography graduate.
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 geography bachelor's degree program you select can have a big impact on your future. This section explores some of the factors we include in our ranking and how much they vary depending on the school you select. When choosing a school we recommend considering some of the following factors:
