Baldwin-Wallace College is adding a public health major for undergraduate students.
The college said the move comes in response to local and national demand for more public health professionals, according to a statement from Baldwin-Wallace (BW).
“It’s a nice field because there’s such a wide variety” of opportunities available to graduates, said June Hart Romeo, chair of BW’s division of health and physical education.
“It’s perfect for students who want to work in the health field, but don’t want to work in direct patient care,” she said.
BW is currently accepting applications for the program, which will start in fall 2011. Romeo expects about 15 students to enroll in the initial class, with the number of annual enrollees jumping to around 30 after a few years.
The major will include the study of biostatistics, epidemiology, environmental health, health policy, and social and behavioral sciences.
Graduates of the program should be good candidates for jobs with public health departments, overseeing vaccination programs or anti-obesity programs for children, for example. Jobs as health educators or as infectious disease experts with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are other possibilities, Romeo said.
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
Tuition at BW averages about $25,000 per year, according to U.S. News and World Report.
Kent State University offers undergraduate and graduate programs in public health through its College of Public Health, which was established in 2009. Kent was the first college in the state to offer a bachelor of science degree in public health. Bluffton University in northwest Ohio last month announced plans to begin offering a public health program for undergraduates.
The U.S. will need an additional 250,000 public health workers by 2020 to avert a “public health workforce crisis,” according to (pdf) a 2008 report from the Association of Schools of Public Health. Part of the reason behind that need is that more than 20 percent of the nation’s public health workers were projected to retire within four years of the report being issued.
