Trends in the Conferral of Graduate Public Health Degrees: A Triangulated Approach

Trends in the conferral of public health degrees provide a lens into the public health workforce. As the needs of workforce development grow and change, it is imperative to accurately characterize trends in degree conferrals to estimate the future size and composition of the public health workforce. The challenging task of enumerating public health degree conferrals aligns with the equally challenging task of enumerating the public health workforce, for which the “methodology used needs further improvements in standardization, specificity, data storage, and data availability.” Although a 2015 study characterized the growth of the undergraduate public health major in the United States, our study focused on graduate-level public health education trends in the United States.