King's College London

The QS Worldwide University Rankings shows Geography at King’s moving up ten places to fourteenth globally.

Head of Department, Professor Kate Schreckenberg said: “I am delighted that the hard work of our staff and students has been recognised by this dramatic rise in the league table. It is testament to the engagement of our teaching and research with key societal issues like climate adaptation, wildfires and housing precarity.”

Geography has been taught at King's since 1922 and currently offers both a BA in Geography and a BSc in Geography and Environmental Science.

Its postgraduate offering includes six different Masters courses spanning topics such as climate change, geopolitics, sustainable cities, and risk.

It’s also one of the largest Graduate Schools of Geography in the UK. Currently, there are approximately 120 students registered in our PhD programmes.

Students are supported by 60 academic staff and by collaborative supervision with external individuals and organisations in the UK and worldwide, including a series of joint PhD programmes with international partners.

Geography’s world-leading research aims to deepen our understanding of the environments and societies in which we live. It focuses on tackling global challenges related to environmental justice, green finance, decolonising development, biodiversity conservation, risk and resilience, and urbanisation.

The 2025 edition of the QS World University Rankings by Subject, released today by global higher education analyst QS Quacquarelli Symonds, provides independent comparative analysis on the performance of more than 18,300 individual university programmes, taken by students at more than 1700 universities in 100 locations around the world, across 55 academic disciplines.

QS uses five key metrics to compile the subject rankings. Reputation indicators are based on the responses of more than 240,000 employers and academics to QS surveys while Citations per Paper and H-Index measure research impact and productivity. International Research Network (IRN) is used to assess cross-border research collaboration.