Geography & Cartography is above average in terms of popularity with it being the #86 most popular bachelor's degree program in the country. So, you have a fair amount of options to choose from when looking for a school.
For its 2025 ranking, College Factual looked at 21 schools in the Far Western US Region to determine which ones were the best for geography & cartography students pursuing a bachelor's degree. Combined, these schools handed out 716 bachelor's degrees in geography & cartography to qualified students.
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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. Below we explain some of the most important factors to consider before making your choice:
Overall Quality Is a Must
The overall quality of a bachelor's degree school is important to ensure a quality education, not just how well they do in a particular major. To account for this we include a college's overall Best Colleges ranking which itself looks at a host of different factors like degree completion, educational resources, student body caliber and post-graduation earnings for the school as a whole.
Average Early-Career Salaries
Average early-career salary of those graduating with their bachelor's degree is one indicator we use in our analysis to find the schools that offer the highest-quality education. After all, your bachelor's degree won't mean much if it doesn't help you find a job that will help you earn a living.
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 complete 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.
When choosing the right school for you, it's important to arm yourself with all the facts you can. To that end, we've created a number of major-specific rankings, including this Best Geography & Cartography Bachelor's Degree Schools in the Far Western US Region list to help you make the college decision.
To further help you make the college decision, we've developed a unique tool called College Combat that allows you to compare schools based on the factors that matter the most to you.
Go ahead and give it a try, or bookmark the link so you can check it out later.
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It is difficult to beat University of California - Los Angeles if you want to pursue a bachelor's degree in geography & cartography. UCLA is a fairly large public university located in the city of Los Angeles.
Bachelor's students who receive their degree from the geography program make around $36,776 in the first couple years of working.
University of California - Santa Barbara is one of the finest schools in the United States for getting a bachelor's degree in geography & cartography. UCSB is a fairly large public university located in the midsize suburb of Santa Barbara.
After graduation, geography bachelor's recipients generally earn an average of $37,398 in their early careers.
It is hard to beat University of Washington - Seattle Campus if you wish to pursue a bachelor's degree in geography & cartography. UW Seattle is a very large public university located in the city of Seattle.
Geography & Cartography bachelor's degree recipients from University of Washington - Seattle Campus receive an earnings boost of about $7,070 over the typical income of geography & cartography graduates.
Located in the city of San Diego, SDSU is a public university with a very large student population.
Those geography & cartography students who get their bachelor's degree from San Diego State University earn $3,229 more than the standard geography grad.
Sac State is a fairly large public university located in the city of Sacramento.
Geography & Cartography bachelor's degree recipients from California State University - Sacramento get an earnings boost of approximately $12,808 over the typical earnings of geography & cartography majors.
Located in the large city of Reno, UNR is a public university with a very large student population.
Those geography & cartography students who get their bachelor's degree from University of Nevada - Reno make $17,660 more than the standard geography grad.
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).