Geographical Perspectives - A Geographer's Thoughts on Business, Real Estate, and Education.

Top Geography Departments – Preliminary Survey Results

I’ve now received a grand total of 11 completed surveys. I still need a lot more to achieve some sort of reasonable sample size so please take the survey. In the meantime, here are some preliminary results.

The top 5 Geography Departments as submitted by survey participants are (drum roll please):

UC Santa Barbara
Penn State
Colorado
Arizona State
Ohio State

These are not terribly consistent with the NRC-based rankings. Penn State and Colorado make the top 5 in both lists (so far) but there are major differences, for example Maryland (#2 NRC) isn’t even in the top 10 at this point.

Which top 5 list makes more sense to you? And if your favorite departments aren’t where they should be take the survey so your votes can count.

Banks are Destroying America’s Neighborhoods

I read an excellent piece this morning in the New York Times written by Greg Smith about why he was leaving Goldman Sachs. In short, he says it’s become too sleazy as short-term profit motives are now trumping all other considerations.

In the past 2.5 years I’ve been investing in real estate in my home town Pueblo, Colorado. What I’ve found is that large banks are dragging out the foreclosure process so that homes are left vacant for 18 months or more. This is bad for everyone.

It’s bad for the banks because while the homes sit vacant they deteriorate and lose value.
It’s bad for the neighborhood because it drives down prices and vacant homes invite criminal activity.
It’s bad for local government because the value decline results in lower revenue while additional criminal activity requires higher expenditures.
It’s bad for investors and prospective buyers because they have to spend more money on repairs.
It’s bad for renters because the reduced housing inventory decreases supply and drives up rental costs.

Visualizing Unemployment Dynamics – Animate and Compare Time Periods

Last week I posted a map illustrating changes in Home Price Indices over the past 5 years. I had one comment on LinkedIn looking for a similar map for unemployment data. This is a different type of map using an older version of TerraSeer’s web mapping technology. The static map below shows county-level unemployment change between Jan 2001 and Dec 2008. You can animate unemployment rates between 1990 and 2010 or compare a custom time period (toggle from “animate” to “compare” – see lower left radio buttons) on the interactive map at TerraSeer. Unemployment data provided by Synergos Technologies. I welcome any feedback!

Do you have data you’d like animated? Or would you like to be able to create map comparisons easily? Let me know! I’d love to help!

Survey: What are the Top Geography Departments in the US?

Recently I compiled a ranking of the Top 20 Geography Departments in the US using the National Research Council’s assessment of doctoral programs. There were some big changes from the last rankings and I received several comments questioning some of the results. I thought it would be fun to conduct a survey and see how the results compare to the NRC rankings.

So, I created a survey to find out what you think. It should only take a few minutes to complete. Click here to take the survey!

There’s space within the survey to provide suggestions but feel free to use the comments section below as well.

Thanks for participating!

Map of Housing Price Index Change Illustrates Four Clusters of Misery

A couple days ago I posted a list of metropolitan areas and their associated 5-year change in housing prices. I find it interesting to see the data at a more granular level because when you aggregate by state a lot of information gets hidden away.

Today I made a map of the same data. I used a new web-based mapping program that TerraSeer is developing called MarketSeer. More on that coming soon. The mapping program is in beta so some options (colors, etc) are limited but here’s a map displaying Housing Price Index changes over 5 years. The darkest green circles have the largest declines in home prices and the light colored circles have had either modest declines or increases in housing prices. The circles are sized by population.

Housing Price Index changes by MSA

I get a little annoyed when I see articles ranking which states have the worst foreclosure problem or the biggest drop in housing prices over time. Why would anyone want to look at this at the state level? Maybe state governors and political talking heads? Not really my kind of audience. The economic drivers that determine the health of a housing market are far more localized and don’t really care about state boundaries. I think you have to at least look at metropolitan areas to learn something about housing prices.

For example, let’s look at Illinois.

Bad UV map hurts melanoma risk screening

A few years ago I tried my hand at writing a few NIH grant proposals. I struck out. I had a couple applications scored but none were funded and they didn’t really come very close. In any case, while I was researching my topic I came across the map below on the National Cancer Institute’s website:

Along with this map and question they provide an explanation:

Question 1:
Does the patient live in the Northern, Central, or Southern United States?

Explanation
Melanoma is more common in people who live in areas that get large amounts of UV radiation from the sun. For example, melanoma is more common in California than in Minnesota, where the sun is not as strong.

Now I’m sure the authors of this screening tool are extraordinarily intelligent people. They probably know everything about microbiology and cancer etiology and they probably kicked my butt in biology, chemistry and every other science class in high school and college. But, couldn’t they have looked at the geographic distribution of UV before they produced this kindergarten map?

Big Changes in Geography Department Rankings

Yesterday I posted my Top 20 Geography Department Rankings. There were some big changes since the last time that the NRC produced rankings and I thought it would be interesting to look at how some departments have moved up and down. So, I compared the 1995 rankings with the 2010 rankings and prepared the list below. Boston University made the biggest improvement while the University of Minnesota took the biggest plunge.

Top 20 Graduate Geography Programs in the U.S.

[highlight color=”options: yellow, black”]This post was written in February 2012. Since then I’ve posted 2013 Geography Program Rankings, 2014 GIS Graduate Program Rankings and, more recently, 2015 Top Graduate Programs for Spatial Careers . Please check out these newer rankings! [/highlight]

I love lists and, especially, ranked lists. Even though I never seriously considered going to medical school or engineering school I was always very interested to find out which programs were ranked at the top. I routinely read the US News & World Report annual rankings of top colleges and graduate programs and I’ve since followed the Wall Street Journal and Economist MBA rankings. When I became interested in pursuing a graduate degree in geography, I was disappointed to find that there were no publications that ranked graduate geography programs. So, I’ve decided to create my own rankings and post them here.

The only available basis for developing rankings of graduate geography programs (that I’m aware of – please comment if you can suggest another good source) comes from the U.S. National Research Council’s survey of doctoral programs. Although some have been critical of the methodology used to develop the rankings, this is as good as it gets for small disciplines like geography. [If you don’t like the rankings below, take my survey and let your opinion be counted!]

Unfortunately, because these rankings were produced by academic types who are masters of creating difficult-to-understand prose for publication in peer review journals, you almost need a PhD to interpret their rankings. So, I’ve tried to clarify these rankings by simply aggregating them together to form a single ranking. So, without further ado, here are my top 20 geography programs in the United States:

Geospatial MBA: a win-win for business schools and geography

I recently posed the following question to a group of geography academic types on LinkedIn:

Why don’t more Geography departments team up with Business Schools to offer joint MBA-MA degrees (or undergraduate double majors)?

It seems to me that this combination would be valuable to many businesses and would serve to promote the discipline of geography while pumping new life into once glorious but now in a bit of a decline MBA programs. For example, business schools would benefit tremendously from geographical analysis methods. There are real estate and finance faculty who have discovered the benefits of geography/GIS and are using it regularly (Susan Wachter at UPenn/Wharton comes to mind) but this seems to be despite the discipline of geography rather than due to encouragement from within.

As a geography person I’m clearly biased but I don’t see why geography shouldn’t be an integral part of a good business education