Whether it’s the Gulf oil spill, the obesity epidemic, lead in children’s toys, or the outbreak of the H1N1 virus, major public health issues regularly capture newspaper headlines and the public’s attention. But for years, education in public health was reserved exclusively for graduate students. Today, however, it is one of the five most rapidly growing college majors, according to The Chronicle of Higher Education.
In 2003, the Institute of Medicine (IOM) of the National Academies recommended that all undergraduates have access to a public health education. In 2006, the Association of Schools of Public Health (ASPH) agreed that undergraduate public health training was necessary to develop an educated citizenry. And in 2009, the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AACU) found the field so timely that it dedicated an issue of its journal to undergraduate public health.
Even the federal government has hopped on board. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services recently proclaimed support for undergraduate education in public health through progressive recommendations in Healthy People 2020, a set of science-based objectives for promoting disease prevention and health in this decade.
No one is more knowledgeable about the rapid rise of undergraduate education in public health — or has had a greater impact on it — than Richard Riegelman, M.D., Ph.D., M.P.H., the founding dean of GW’s Milken Institute School of Public Health and professor of Epidemiology and Biostatistics. As co-chair of the Healthy People Curriculum Task Force, a chief voice of AACU’s Educated Citizen and Public Health Initiative, a leader in ASPH’s Undergraduate Public Health Learning Outcomes Project, and co-author of the foundational curriculum for undergraduate education in public health, Riegelman is recognized as one of the movement’s key driving forces.
Why is it important to offer undergraduate public health education?
The undergraduate public health degree does much more than prepare students to get a job in public health. Rather, it’s about teaching them how to understand public health issues, whether they become clinicians, lawyers, or business people. The goal is to prepare students to understand the world around them, the thinking process, the evidence process of public health. What we [the AACU] want to build is “the educated citizen,” someone who can incorporate public health concepts into his or her decision-making processes.
Why has undergraduate education in public health grown so rapidly?
This is a student-driven movement. When I talk to people around the country about getting started, I tell them, “Put on a good global health course or a good public health course and the students will do the rest,” because the students will enroll, and they’ll want more. At GW, we have to turn away students in the introductory courses, and that’s been the case for many, many institutions. For students, this field of study is inherently relevant and important to our society, so it’s not a hard sell.
How will the Healthy People 2020 goals affect undergraduate public health education?
There are two key objectives that will impact undergraduate public health education. The first is to increase the number of four-year colleges that offer undergraduate majors or minors. The second is to increase the number of two-year colleges that offer basic public health courses, as well as job-related certificates and associate degrees. Through those objectives we hope to achieve as much as a 40 percent increase in the number of both four-year and two-year colleges and universities.
Why are these goals significant?
At last count, only about 16 percent of colleges and universities offered public health majors or minors. We hope that the Healthy People 2020 goals will enable public health to be seen as an important part of any higher education curriculum. We hope that people will eventually see that Public Health 101, Epidemiology 101, and Global Health 101 are just as important as Economics 101, Psychology 101, and Political Science 101. The mentality should be, “Of course this is a part of undergraduate education.”
What are you doing to help implement these goals?
I have been working a lot on making things easier for the faculty, since one of the major challenges with the movement is recruiting and preparing them to teach undergraduate public health. When the faculty are provided with course frameworks, learning objectives, and help on how to get the classes approved, they can receive the support they need to get this discipline to become part of their institution’s curriculum and academic culture.
What is GW’s role in the undergraduate public health movement?
GW’s undergraduate public health program has been recognized as a national model. This is because, I think, we have had a reasonably clear goal of what we want to do. Our strategy is to create a generalist program, with a lot of broad foundations, integrated courses, and synthesis. The bottom line is that we are creating something that is different from what is done at the graduate level, which tends to be more discipline-based. The undergraduate programs focus on the breadth of the field, while the graduate programs focus on its depth. This is an approach that is catching on nationally.
We also have a commitment to teaching at GW — we don’t have to pull teeth to get faculty to teach undergraduate courses. We have people who love it, so everybody who teaches undergraduates here does it because they want to.
How has the movement changed from when you first began advocating for undergraduate programs in public health?
It’s great to be involved in a project where I can really see changes being made. It’s very reinforcing to see the kind of progress being made and the kind of enthusiasm from students. You push uphill, but once you achieve acceptance from 4,000 four-year colleges, 1,100 community colleges, and even the federal government, all acknowledging that this is a good idea, it’s a different story; a different dynamic. It’s no longer an uphill fight. Now it’s about guidance on how this whole thing should be run.
