Undergraduate public health, lessons learned from undergraduate health administration education.

Abstract

The rapid growth in the number of undergraduate programs in public health reflects a similar earlier experience in health administration education in North America and offers a set of experiences that we may both learn from and contribute to. In a similar fashion to the public health discipline first awarding the MPH degree, the entry level health administration credential began as a masters degree in 1933, and subsequent degrees followed awarding the Master of Health Administration (MHA) and similar degrees. In the 1970s, undergraduate programs in health administration began to proliferate, and the graduate programs were “initially very cautious about establishing formal relationships” (1) requiring consideration of a set of questions about the relationship between baccalaureate and masters degree education in the discipline. This experience may be beneficial in addressing the more recent undergraduate/graduate degree relationship in public health. While there are numerous issues to consider, this commentary will address several of the most important issues. In 1975, Andrew Patullo, then Senior Vice-President of the W. K. Kellogg Foundation noted that “in light” of health administration being associated with graduate education, the development of undergraduate education presented a perplexing development, and nonetheless, the establishment of baccalaureate programs was seen as a “logical sequential development” (2) Table ​Table11 presents a series of key events in the evolution of baccalaureate education in health administration, and a surprisingly similar set of parallel events in the more recent evolution of public health education. While it is not a certainty that parallel events will continue, the authors believe that anticipating subsequent issues from health administration will facilitate the maturation of undergraduate public health education. Table 1 Comparable events in the development of undergraduate health administration and public health education.