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.
In 2024, College Factual analyzed 3 schools in order to identify the top ones for its Best Geography & Cartography Bachelor's Degree Schools in Washington ranking. When you put them all together, these colleges and universities awarded 181 bachelor's degrees in geography & cartography during the 2020-2021 academic year.
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 quality education, not just how well they do in a particular major. To account for this we consider a school's overall Best Colleges ranking which itself looks at a host 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 Washington 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.
Best Schools for Bachelor’s Students to Study Geography & Cartography in Washington
Below you'll see a list of the best colleges and universities for pursuing a bachelor's degree in geography & cartography.
Top Washington Schools for a Bachelor's in Geography
It is difficult to beat University of Washington - Seattle Campus if you want 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 approximately $8,191 over the typical income of geography & cartography graduates.
Any student pursuing a degree in a bachelor's degree in geography & cartography has to look into Western Washington University. Located in the city of Bellingham, WWU is a public university with a large student population.
Soon after graduation, geography bachelor's recipients typically earn an average of $29,880 at the beginning of their careers.
Any student pursuing a degree in a bachelor's degree in geography & cartography needs to check out Central Washington University. CWU is a medium-sized public university located in the distant town of Ellensburg.
Students who graduate with their bachelor's from the geography program report average early career wages of $32,782.
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).