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PolicyMap
    • Create Maps
    • Access Data
    • Publish Maps
    • Visualize Your Data
    • Publish Dashboards
    • Analysis and Insights Services
    • Integrations
    • Community Health
    • COVID-19
    • Good Government
    • Housing Quality
    • Racial and Ethnic Disparities
    • Academic
    • Commercial
    • Community Health
    • Finance
    • Government
    • Nonprofit
    • Public Library
    • Blog
    • Customer Stories
    • Events
    • News & Press
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  • Pricing
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    • Careers
  • Contact Us
  • Open Map

Colleges & Universities

Easy-to-use data and mapping tools for students, faculty, researchers, and administrators.
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Help students across disciplines understand geographic data without having to take a specialized class.

Use PolicyMap to bring sophisticated data, mapping and analytics to fields beyond traditional GIS and planning departments. From public health to sociology and law, students can use PolicyMap to create maps, reports and analyses to enable a deeper understanding of crucial areas in their fields. Our vast data library contains thousands of data indicators from hundreds of resources and is always standardized and cleaned and eliminates digging for data from disparate sources.

Join hundreds of top-tier colleges and universities that already subscribe to PolicyMap.

Download: “Developing Data-Savvy Future Leaders”

Want to bring GIS insights without specialized classes to your college or university? PolicyMap empowers students, faculty, researchers and administrators with place-based data to answer research questions across disciplines. To learn more data sources and topics, download our brochure.

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Simple, Secure Access Through Your University Library

Universities can make access to PolicyMap available to all library users via login, Single Sign-On, or IP authentication (no login required). Users can create their own individual accounts.

Download Data For Use In Other Applications

Download consistently formatted flat file data from PolicyMap’s library of over 37,000 indicators for use in your own statistical, mapping, and data visualization tools.

No Specialized Training Required

Spend less time learning a complicated GIS tool and gathering data. Instead, students can focus on visualizing and interpreting data immediately.

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Request a Demo

Interested in to learning more about PolicyMap, exploring our data warehouse, understanding our mapping capabilities, or getting a quote? Schedule a PolicyMap demonstration for faculty, staff and/or students.

Please share a bit about yourself, and we’ll be in touch in short order.

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Get instant access to the web’s largest place-based data library

Explore maps and create custom reports of data related to demographics, real estate, health, jobs, the environment, education and more. Available data is continuously updated.

Gain simple, secure access through your university library

Colleges and universities can purchase enterprise licenses for their libraries and make access to PolicyMap available to all users via IP authentication or Single Sign On (SSO). No login required; library users may create their own individual accounts for storage of PolicyMap work products.

If your university uses a Single Sign On (SSO) tool to access its applications, PolicyMap can readily integrate with it. We have implemented SSO for many clients, using a variety of their SSO tools, such as OpenAthens, ADSF, Okta, and native SAML 2.0. We are happy to provide an implementation that will seamlessly integrate into the SSO system you use to manage your applications. Contact us for additional information.

Professor Anne Hewitt of Seton Hall University uses PolicyMap in the classroom to map social determinants of health, linking them with clinical conditions and outcomes in her course “Managing Community and Population Health.”

Data Sources

Exclusive data sets include Social Needs, Medical Spending Estimates, Consumer Spending Habits, and Small Area Health Estimates. Contact us for complete list of our data on our website.

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Demographics

Population, race and ethnicity, age, sex, languages, foreign born, migration and immigration, households, families, homelessness, elections, religion

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Incomes & Spending

Incomes, poverty, tax returns, federal benefits, bankruptcies, housing burdens, consumer spending, medical spending

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Housing

Home sales, rents, building permits, residential & commercial vacancy, subsidized households, public housing, LIHTC

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Lending

Mortgage originations, government insured loans, refinance loans, mortgages by race, ethnicity, income, bank branches, credit unions, Historic Lending Boundaries

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Quality of Life

Crime, broadband access, time to work, heating fuel types, food access, farmers’ markets, environmental hazards, libraries, museums, parks, disaster risk

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Economy

Jobs, unemployment, wages, small business, employment, workforce characteristics, oil and gas production

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Education

School enrollment, educational attainment, graduation rates, school performance, cost of college, student loan debt, school locations, college locations, head start locations

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Health

Infectious diseases, opioid use, chronic conditions, access to health care, health insurance, health risk factors, federal health programs, health facility locations, food access

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Federal Guidelines

NMTC eligibility & investments, Opportunity Zones, persistent poverty, CDBG eligibility, housing opportunity index, CRA eligible areas, SBA HUB Zones, Promise Zones

Data available through PolicyMap is authoritative and current.

University Libraries sought to provide faculty, graduate students and undergraduate students with a simple spatial analysis tool. PolicyMap was a practical choice to give our academic community access to demographic, health and economic variables. Student research utilizing this geographic tool will inform their subject knowledge as well as enhance their digital literacy and critical analysis skills.

Dr. John Buschman, Dean of Seton Hall’s University Libraries

Relevant Data Across Disciplines

Learn how colleges and universities of all sizes use PolicyMap across multiple disciplines. The platform allows students to visualize social, economic, and health factors, including social determinants of health; racial and ethnic disparities; computer and internet access; social problems; housing trends, and environmental justice without having to master a sophisticated software program.

Social Sciences

Sample Syllabus:
University of Delaware

Urban Studies
and Planning

Webinar:
University of Pennsylvania

Public Health

Sample Syllabus:
Seton Hall University

Customer Story:
Thomas Jefferson University

Community and Economic Development

Sample Syllabus:
Columbia University

Customer Story:
NYU Furman Center

Public Administration
and Policy

Sample Syllabus:
University of Massachusetts Boston

Political Science

Assignment:
Bowling Green State University

Business

Master’s Thesis:
Drexel University

Marketing Research Course:
Penn State University Harrisburg

Geography

Conference Presentation:
UMass Boston

Real Estate

Student Paper:
University of Minnesota

Education

Blog Post:
Monitor Pandemic-Related Education Setbacks

Environmental Studies

Published Paper:
Harvard University, Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco

Economics and Statistics

Student Paper:
Rutgers University

Journalism

Strengthening reporting through data.

Sample Syllabus:
University of Southern California (1)
University of Southern California (2)

Join Our Mailing List

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Using PolicyMap to Teach Environmental (In)Justice

Watch University of Delaware Professor Victor Perez demonstrate how to examine environmental justice issues using PolicyMap.

MORE RESOURCES

Sample Exercises

Assignments & Papers

Classroom Webinars

Video Case Studies

Features

PolicyMap’s improved platform allows for the easy creation of beautiful maps, trend charts, and reports. Users efficiently view data on our customizable maps of up to 5-layers or download social, economic, and health data. They upload their own place-based data and overlay it with layers from our comprehensive library of data indicators.

Make maps with your data and ours.

Visualize the impact of your organization or the needs of your community with our exclusive data.

Gain insights with reports.

Instantly run community profiles for your community or a custom area.

Upload your own data.

Use our unlimited self-service data loader to overlay your address-level data on top of PolicyMap’s.

Find areas with overlapping criteria.

Use our Multi-layer Maps for site selection, to find hot spots or target specific areas.

Download our data.

Use our data in your own research, mapping and presentation tools.

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Share your work.

Email, embed and post on social media — or print maps with ease.

No training required.

No special GIS training required to start making maps, but we are available to help you at any time.

Stop Collecting. Start Analyzing.

Easily integrate place-based data into your own website or application.

Consult with our Data Analysts.

Send us your data, and we’ll recommend how to effectively visualize it. We’ll standardize and clean it, too.

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