When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, interest in medical professions surged in what some have dubbed the “Fauci effect,” and the field of public health was no different. In fact, master’s degree programs in public health (MPH) experienced the largest year-over-year increase in applications. Truth be told, interest in public health had been growing for decades, with the number of public health degrees awarded swelling by more than 300% from 1992 to 2016.
“Public health has been one of the fastest growing areas in a sustained way since the early 2000s through the mid-2010s,” says JP Leider, a senior fellow of the Division of Health Policy and Management at the University of Minnesota and the co-author of multiple studies about trends in public health degrees. “It’s just been really rapid in the past two decades.”
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By far, an MPH is the most popular public health degree. With numbers climbing in recent decades and a spike in interest because of the pandemic, here’s a look at how the popularity of this degree program has changed over time.
What was interest in MPH degrees like before the pandemic?
Even before the pandemic added terms like community spread, droplet transmission, and super-spreader to our shared lexicon, public health was having a moment. After 9/11, concerns grew about bioterrorism attacks, which led to increased awareness of the field of public health and increased funding for public health training.
“You have long existing programs—programs that had been around since the ’50s—grow, but really you also see a lot of standalone graduate programs come into existence, and that’s because there [is] a lot more interest in the MPH,” says Leider, who also serves as director of the University of Minnesota’s Center for Public Health Systems. “Both happened substantially in the late aughts.”
From 2000 to 2020, the number of master’s degrees in public health awarded grew from roughly 5,000 to more than 18,000. At the same time, there was what Leider dubs “the undergrad public health explosion,” with undergrad degrees awarded growing from roughly 1,500 to more than 18,000.
Prior to the pandemic, however, public health began to wane in popularity—and the number of applicants to programs dipped nationwide for the first time. Leider says there are multiple reasons for the decline, including the student loan crisis.
“There is some thought that there was a saturation of the market,” Leider says. “There were over 300 schools and programs awarding these degrees, and some question about whether there were too many folks in the marketplace” looking for jobs.
How did the pandemic increase interest in MPH degrees?
Interest in MPH degrees skyrocketed once the pandemic hit, reversing the prior trend.
“COVID hits and creates the largest one-time bump in interest in the MPH that we’ve ever seen,” Leider says. “COVID put public health and public health education not just on the map, but in everybody’s homes. People knew what an epidemiologist was, and, when you ask kids what they want to be when they grow up, maybe they would say an epidemiologist for the first time, and that’s powerful.”
Interest in George Washington University’s MPH programs was steady before the pandemic, but exploded when COVID hit, says George Gray, associate dean of MPH programs and program director at George Washington University’s Milken Institute School of Public Health. “We had a more than 50% increase in the number of students in 2020” in GWU’s online MPH program, says Gray. The school landed the No. 1 spot on Fortune’s first-ever ranking of the best online MPH programs.
Since early 2021, interest in public health degrees has begun to decline from its COVID peak, but Leider says it’s still higher than it was before 2018. Gray says this trend also holds true at GWU, where there’s some return to “normal” though interest is “still above pre-pandemic levels.”
What’s the future for MPH degrees?
Many factors may impact future interest in MPH degrees, according to Leider. With ongoing questions about an economic recession, the labor shortage, and low unemployment, Leider says it’s difficult to forecast interest in MPH degrees in the immediate future. Still, economic insecurity usually bodes well for learning institutions.
“There’s no question that when economies are uncertain, people apply to graduate school,” Leider says. Still, current dynamics may disrupt that type of conventional thinking. “People talk about a recession strangely. People talk about inflation strangely. These are strange times for labor, and so it makes sense that you would see [fewer] applications to any graduate schools or postsecondary.”
And it’s difficult to predict how other factors could affect the popularity of this degree going forward. Will the pandemic lead people to a sustained interest in public health for job security or legitimate interest in saving lives? Will the demographic shift of having fewer young people than previous generations impact interest in MPH degrees? Leider says it’s hard to know.
For his part, Gray believes that the exposure that the field of public health received from the pandemic will continue to draw new applicants to MPH programs.
“Student interest will continue to be higher,” Gray predicts. “There’s more awareness of what public health is. There is more interest in being part of the solution.”
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