a doctor's degree in geography is more popular than many other degrees. In fact, it ranks #93 out of 862 on popularity of all such degrees in the nation. This means you won't have too much trouble finding schools that offer the degree.
College Factual looked at 3 colleges and universities when compiling its 2025 Best Geography Doctor's Degree Schools ranking. Combined, these schools handed out 151 doctor's degrees in geography to qualified students.
Choosing a Great Geography School for Your Doctor's Degree
Your choice of geography for getting your doctor's degree school matters. Important measures of a quality geography program can vary widely even among the top schools. 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 account for this we include a school's overall Best Colleges for a Doctor's Degree 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.
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 students vs. other majors.
Major Demand - The number of geography students who choose to seek a doctor'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.
Accreditation - Whether a school is regionally accredited and/or accredited by a recognized geography related body.
Our complete ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best schools for geography students working on their doctor'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 Doctor's Degree Schools list to help you make the college decision.
Best Schools for Doctorate Students to Study Geography in the United States
Learn about the top ranked colleges and universities for geography students seeking a a doctor's degree.
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).