Thinking of living in Baltimore as you study for your social work degree? Good idea! Known as “Charm City,” Baltimore is a big city with a small-town feel and loaded with fantastic restaurants, craft breweries, museums, professional sports, and more. It’s a home base for many D.C. commuters, young professionals, and folks looking for big-city amenities but also preserves the vibe of a smaller town and a lower cost of living. 

  • Baltimore is just off of the Chesapeake Bay, located about an hour’s drive north of Washington, D.C., and two hours south of Philadelphia. 
  • With a population of around 600,000 people, Baltimore is Maryland’s most populous city, while its metro-area population of 2.8 million makes it the 21st largest metro area in the U.S. 
  • Founded in 1729, Baltimore may be one of America’s oldest cities, but its residents tend to be on the younger side, with a median age of around 35 years old, three years younger than the national median. 

Explore these great Baltimore resources:

Opened in 1807, the University of Maryland, Baltimore (UMB) is Maryland’s public health, law, and human services university, dedicated to excellence in education, research, clinical care, and public service.

UMB enrolls nearly 7,000 students in six nationally ranked professional schools — dentistry, law, medicine, nursing, pharmacy, and social work — and an interdisciplinary Graduate School. The University offers 90 doctoral, master’s, baccalaureate, and certificate programs and confers most of the professional practice doctoral degrees awarded in Maryland.

UMB is a thriving academic health center combining cutting-edge biomedical research and exceptional patient care. UMB’s extramural funding totaled $654 million in Fiscal Year 2022, and each tenured/tenure-track faculty member brings $1.5 million in research grants, on average, into UMB every year.

Something special is happening in Baltimore and you can be a part of it.

Ready to be a Changemaker?