Progress in the Articulation of Undergraduate and Graduate Public Health?

Historically, in the absence of baccalaureate education in the public health, entry level education was offered at the graduate level in the Master of Public Health (MPH) degree. As MPH education was not preceded by baccalaureate education in the discipline, there are not typically prerequisite requirements for MPH admission, and introductory coursework in public health has always been offered at the graduate level. Other disciplines including business and nursing offer joint and dual degree programs; however, these programs are typically designed to accelerate completion of baccalaureate and graduate degrees (1–4) rather than supplement graduate with undergraduate education. While the developers of new undergraduate public health programs may look at the experience in other disciplines, public health presents the atypical characteristic that well-established graduate education preceded undergraduate education. In addition, review of a variety of accelerated programs at different universities demonstrates that they tend to be unique to individual universities rather than of a standard design. The recent establishment of undergraduate public health degree programs presents an interesting situation for students seeking an MPH degree following completion of their baccalaureate degree. The typical curricula at both the undergraduate and graduate levels will require similar, but not identical introductory courses that likely vary in depth and breadth as detailed elsewhere by the authors (5,6). Consequently, these students will potentially experience unintended duplication of content with additional costs of time and money. As undergraduate public health education began to experience interest and rapid growth, one of the authors of this commentary published a paper Articulation of Undergraduate and Graduate Education in Public Health (7). The paper addressed the benefits of designing strategies to better coalesce or articulate undergraduate and graduate education, identifying barriers to articulation and strategies to achieve alignment between undergraduate and graduate education. The paper additionally presented a set of issues that were unanswered and require careful consideration. It is now 6 years later, and the authors wish to assess progress in articulating undergraduate and graduate public health education to achieve greater harmony between the two degrees. In doing so, we presume that improving the articulation of undergraduate and graduate programs to better align public health in a manner similar to many other disciplines is beneficial and have not heard arguments to the contrary. While there has not been a systematic national effort to catalog implementation of these strategies, the authors have sought to identify examples of progress where they exist. Each of the proposed strategies and observations offering examples of current status follow.