So, you want to go to school and get that degree – maybe you want to be a Geographer? Well, there’s some great news as a there’s now a webmap that can show you where you can get your degree – The College Map (Beta) #EDU #STEM #GeoEducation.
The U.S. Department of Education tool, College Map, was developed to aid students in their college-choice process by visually identifying potential colleges or universities. This tool draws from the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data Systems (IPEDS), an annual survey that collects data from over 7,500 colleges, universities, and technical and vocational institutions. Data used in the College Map are for the 2015-16 year, which is the most recent available data.
College Navigator is a direct link to nearly 7,000 colleges and universities in the United States. If you are thinking about a large university, a small liberal arts college, a specialized college, a community college, a career or technical college or a trade school, you can find information on all of them here. The resource allows users to do several things, including:
- Refine your search with More Search Options to select additional search criteria.
- Build a list of schools using My Favoritesfor side-by-side comparisons.
- Pinpoint school locations with an interactive map.
- Export search results into a spreadsheet.
- Save your session including search options and favorites.
Start Your Search
To start using the map simply jump to https://nces.ed.gov/ipeds/CollegeMap/, then at the prompt, enter a Major of interest and/or a location (State) to begin your search – for example, we enter Geography / Cartography in Colorado. This returns about 10 hits which are displayed on the map (dots) as well as in a tabular listing along the right sidebar. Each listing is provide along with a link to the school profile, cost of tuition (in and out of State), and logo. Results can also be easily shared via email, Twitter, facebook etc… this is the resulting Tweet generated when clicking the Tweet icon “College Map made locating schools a breeze. Check out what I found http://bit.ly/2ppvhAa“. Clicking the school profile link results in an information page containing a wealth of information. Below is the detailed information for the University of Colorado Boulder:
The query builder enables users to search for school programs with greater precision. For example, you might wish to search for programs in a particular State that award Bachelor’s degree via a 4 year program in a public institution. See these results as an example (shown below). From the map, users can further refine the search results by specifying schools of a certain size, rural locations only, and even schools with on-campus housing.
The map below shows the results when starting a search by looking for programs in Colorado. My only suggestion would be that the map would be much more useful (and appealing) if a basemap layer was applied in order to view relative position to major places.
See more about the resource from The National Center for Education Statistics at https://nces.ed.gov/collegenavigator/
Good luck with your search. And remember, once you complete that degree in Geography, be sure to boast about it, perhaps with a very cool “Geographer” T-shirt!
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