a master's degree in geography & cartography is more popular than many other degrees. In fact, it ranks #111 out of 343 on popularity of all such degrees in the nation. As a result, there are many college that offer the degree, making your choice of school a hard one.
In 2025, College Factual analyzed 3 schools in order to identify the top ones for its Best Geography & Cartography Master's Degree Schools in California ranking. When you put them all together, these colleges and universities awarded 162 master's degrees in geography & cartography during the 2022-2023 academic year.
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Choosing a Great Geography & Cartography School for Your Master's Degree
The geography master'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. To make it into this list, a school must excel in the following areas.
A Great Overall School
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 for a Master's Degree ranking. This ranking considered factors such as graduation rates, overall graduate earnings and other educational resources to identify great colleges and universities.
Early-Career Earnings
One measure we use to determine the quality of a school is to look at the average salary of master's graduates during the early years of their career. That is, everyone wants their master's degree to be worth something, and salaries are one measure of determining that.
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 - The number of geography & cartography students who choose to seek a master's degree at the school.
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 master'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 schools for geography & cartography students working on their master's degree.
Since picking the right college can be one of the most important decisions of your life, we've developed the Best Geography & Cartography Master's Degree Schools in California ranking, along with many other major-related rankings, to help you make that decision.
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It is difficult to beat University of Southern California if you want to pursue a master's degree in geography & cartography. USC is a fairly large private not-for-profit university located in the large city of Los Angeles.
Students who graduate with their master's from the geography program report average early career earnings of $61,063.
It's hard to beat California State University - Long Beach if you want to pursue a master's degree in geography & cartography. CSULB is a very large public university located in the city of Long Beach.
Master's recipients from the geography & cartography major at California State University - Long Beach get $6,234 above the average college graduate in this field when they enter the workforce.
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 master'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. To make it into this list, a school must excel in the following areas.
