For over 75 years, geography departments have been nearly nonexistent at so-called elite colleges in the United States. Most Ivy League schools, as well as Stanford and the University of Chicago, once had geography departments. Now, the only one with a geography department is Dartmouth. Having taught college geography for over eight years, I can attest that most American college students never take a geography course. They graduate without ever having to demonstrate that they know anything about the physical or cultural landscapes of other countries, let alone their own.
American geographic education took a massive step backward in the wake of World War II, when Harvard shut down its geography department in 1948 and most other U.S. colleges with geography departments followed suit. But while geography went out of style among the elites, since the 1980s it has made a major resurgence, especially in the land-grant universities, where greater emphases on energy, agriculture, and natural-resource management provide a demand for geographic knowledge.