Boston College’s global public health and the common good program is partnering with the Tufts University School of Medicine to offer an accelerated master of public health (MPH) degree.
“People with an MPH degree are the key members of the public health workforce in America,” said Philip Landrigan, director of BC’s global public health and the common good program and the Global Observatory on Planetary Health. “Probably half or more positions in the city health departments and state health departments around the country are filled by people with an MPH degree.”
The MPH pathway allows junior and senior undergraduate students at BC to earn up to 12 Tufts MPH credits toward the 42-credit program while still working towards their BC bachelor’s degree.
The idea for the partnership program began almost a decade ago, Landrigan said—Marcia Boumil, professor of public health and community medicine at the Tufts School of Medicine, began collaborating about the idea of a possible MPH program with Summer Sherburne Hawkins, professor in the BC School of Social Work, but the scheme never took flight.
But then, a leadership switch across the river got the ball rolling again.
“A few years after I got to BC, there was a change in leadership at Tufts,” Landrigan said. “They said that they would really like to resurrect the idea that Dr. Boumil and Dr. Summer had discussed earlier. The talks got serious, and we finalized it over the past year and a half.”
While still enrolled at BC, students in the MPH pathway will take four three-credit courses for the degree—two in person through BC and two online through Tufts, according to Landrigan and Heather Lawson, assistant director of the MPH pathway.
“The two BC classes that they take while they’re here are graduate-level versions of our current courses,” Lawson said.
While the MPH pathway is open to any upperclassman who chooses to apply, the majority of students pursuing the degree are already majors or minors in global public health and the common good, Landrigan said.
“It’s not an absolute requirement, but 99 percent of the students who are going to go into this accelerated program are students that are already in either the public health minor or the public health major,” Landrigan said. “So they will have already had some entry-level public health courses before they move into this.”
The global public health and the common good program does not have any plans to enact a dual-degree program with any other medical schools in Boston for the time being.
Students enrolled in the MPH pathway will also not have to pay for the two Tufts courses they take as BC undergraduates, since both BC and Tufts participate in the Boston Consortium for Higher Education, a group formed to foster collaboration between the 23 New England institutions enrolled.
“The reason that Tufts is so attractive is because of the Boston Consortium, and if we tried to partner with another school outside of Boston, the free tuition a student would get through the Boston Consortium wouldn’t apply,” Landrigan said.
After students in the MPH pathway graduate from BC, they will immediately matriculate into their graduate studies at Tufts, according to Landrigan.
“They can graduate from here in May of their year and go right to Tufts, and then complete their MPH in a single year,” Landrigan said.
There is a specific application for BC students interested in the MPH pathway, as students must be accepted into the MPH at Tufts to qualify for the pathway, both Landrigan and Lawson said.
“Tufts has an application process, and students apply, and they get letters of recommendation from BC faculty and other people,” Landrigan said. “We have just heard in the past two weeks that three of our students have just very recently been accepted.”
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