Fortune Education Ranked Oregon State University’s Online Master’s in Public Health Program fifth in the country for 2025, above leading contenders like Columbia University and Johns Hopkins University. Directors say OSU’s program, which began in 2018, exemplifies the university’s land-grant mission in striving to serve Oregon communities.
“It’s exciting. The professors work very hard and the program has seen great growth,” said Jill Hoxmeier, director of the online MPH program in OSU’s College of Health. “It’s nice to be recognized.”
The online program is the Master of Public Health Practice and was designed to train students to perform applied work in a broad range of disciplines under the public health umbrella, Hoxmeier said. Its faculty includes instructors in epidemiology, health behavior and promotion, biostatistics, environmental and occupational health, global health, and health systems and policy.
In the on-campus Master of Public Health, students choose a discipline to specialize in, while the online program is more of a fusion, Hoxmeier said.
Students who earn a master’s degree in public health can work in a variety of fields, such as in city, county, or state health departments, as well as in nongovernmental organizations. The online program provides flexibility for students currently working full time, many at OSU Extension, so they can fit classes around their schedule.
“We have students who have worked in public health but want to learn different skills or move to a higher level within their own organization. We have students who work in health care as practitioners – nurses, doctors – and they see the benefit of having a public health perspective in their own work,” Hoxmeier said.
Cultivating students who are passionate about public health is more important than ever, she said.
“Particularly in our country, where we see worsening inequities and challenges related to federal support for public health, there are many opportunities,” she said. “We absolutely need people with the skills to do this work. »
The online program has 31 students enrolled this year.
“As a land-grant university, being able to reach communities across the state was really important and unique for our Master of Public Health program, and having an online MPH allows us to do that, especially if people don’t are unwilling or unable to move. Corvallis,” said Jonathan Garcia, director of the MPH program on campus and associate professor of global health.
OSU’s connection to Extension has also provided internship and job opportunities for MPH students and graduates, he said. The program’s internship coordinator, Tonya Johnson, brought experience and connections from her previous work at Extension to help students engage in communities across the state.
Overall, although Fortune uses an algorithm to determine program scores, OSU directors attribute their rankings to Ecampus’ long-standing expertise in online education, the flexibility that the online program offers students from around the world and the program’s intentional focus on practical public health applications.
Garcia said Oregon also attracts students interested in the work OSU faculty are doing that is tailored to areas such as gender-affirming care, research on how to support survivors of cancer in Latino communities or the fight against clean water and sanitation in rural communities.
“There is something special about Oregon as a state when it comes to its focus on health equity, and it attracts people from other states,” he said. declared. “The fact that with an online degree you can access this group of professors while living in a setting where it is available also makes it special.”