"This is a great age for geography. Very big questions - climate, poverty, disease, migration, water, energy, biodiversity - all demand geographical analysis, as do specific national issues in the UK, like housing, social deprivation, flooding and regional development. As the population grows, and with pressures on the Earth's systems increasing, geography has never been so important." Nicholas Crane (former RGS-IBG President)
"Geography is no longer just something which you learn from a book and a map and that’s it. It’s very much now a collaborative thing. The world is out there, you can go and see for yourself, very often now for very small amounts of money, what the world looks like, and I think that’s a great opportunity. I think it broadens the mind. That’s one obvious thing, but also I think it just helps us to understand how other countries are the way they are, and this is really very important in just helping us to realise that we all share the same planet and we should know more about what makes us different as well as what makes us similar." Michael Palin (former RGS-IBG President)
If you want to better understand our world, a rewarding job that pays well and to help shape the future, then look no further. Report after report tells the same story: choose geography.
At GCSE level, geography is part of the English Baccalaureate (EBacc), a selection of core academic subjects on which school performance is measured. It is an essential humanities choice as it offers the greatest flexibility for future subject choices.
Then at A Level, geography is a ‘facilitating subject’ and one of the choices most likely to secure you a place at a top university. Its combination of physical and social sciences, data skills and real world applications, makes geography a highly relevant subject to study and the perfect companion to any other humanities, arts or science subjects.
At undergraduate level, geography boasts some of the highest student satisfaction rates and lowest dropout rates. Geography graduates are also very well prepared for employment in a wide range of sectors, meaning they’re unlikely to be unemployed.
And at all levels, geography is the bridge between the natural and social sciences, providing its own specialist knowledge and skills and the valuable interdisciplinary approaches needed to address pressing global issues from climate change and migration, to environmental change and social cohesion.