Summer is normally a relatively quiet time in the academic world. Some students are taking classes, but many have the time off for work and/or an earned reprieve. Most every year, we get updates from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) as to the latest graduation trends. Their data lets us update our dashboards, for one. But more importantly, the use of NCES data, in combination with data from the Association of Schools and Programs of Public Health (ASPPH), serves as the ‘surveillance’ function for graduate education – and more recently undergraduate education. The 2023 data are now out. The story is interesting, but also potentially troubling.

According to the latest data, master’s degree programs have regained their status as the most-awarded public health degree. Talk about a COVID bump. Any additional enrollments from 2020 or 2021 are likely to hit bachelor’s and doctoral degree totals in 2024 or 2025 (or even later). So, is this Masters estimate representative of a trend, and if so – toward which direction? There is good reason to think we may be entering high-water-mark territory; the COVID pandemic has faded from the minds of many, the economy is still relatively strong, and higher education faces an impending demographic cliff, with fewer young people around to pursue higher education. Applications to many schools and programs of public health are down from COVID highs, and even the pre-COVID 2018 peak.

One tidbit you might observe in Figure 1 is a ‘new’ CIP code. Well, new to us in public health, at least. Let us back up for a minute.

Did you know most public health graduates do not graduate as a STEM major?

This truly wild and bizarre fact never ceases to surprise. The academic study of public health has been recognized as a science independent of medicine for over a century. What amazes, and disappoints, is that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) (that inexplicably oversees STEM designations) keeps choosing not to make the Public Health CIP code (51.22) STEM. In July of this year, DHS affirmed that Environmental Health Sciences (51.2202), Health/Medical Physics (51.2205), Epidemiology (26.1309) and Biostatistics (26.1102) are the only public health sciences to qualify for STEM. But there is a twist – some public health schools are now reclassifying their general public health programs to Biomedical Sciences, General (26.01012), which is STEM.

Original source

You might reasonably ask – why should any normal person care about these program reclassifications – even if the largest and top-ranked public health school in the country has done it? Setting aside that you are choosing to read this post, and what that means for our collective status as ‘normal,’ it matters for two reasons.

One – STEM classifications are an extremely good thing for international students, and institutions are competing for these students as domestic applications fall. Graduating from a STEM-designated program means international students have 3 years to find work before their F-1 visas expire (compared to 1 for non-STEM); this also means STEM grads have three chances at an H1-B, compared to 1 for non-STEM. An international student that wants to stay in the US has a huge incentive to pick a STEM degree – and, it appears, for institutions to try and convert existing non-STEM programs to a STEM designation.

And two – this particular approach to STEM classification has negative ramifications. While a number of public health programs in our field are classified as STEM, most students graduate from the Public Health-General area (non-STEM, Figures 2 and 3). So, why not just reclassify all public health degrees as Biomedical Sciences, General, to give all programs a STEM designation?  Because while reclassifying a public health program from ‘public health’ to another science artificially to game the STEM classification is great for applicants in the short term, it hurts our field in the long run. For other schools and programs, the student recruitment playing field is no longer level. That’s not great. But worse is the second overall reason reclassification to a general/miscellaneous code matters – we will not be able to reliably count our graduates any longer. How many of these Biomed General grads are actually public health grads versus some other biomedical science? How many students are being affected by the lack of STEM designation for all public health degrees, and how many of those are international students with real-world visa impacts? If people aren’t using the same standards to count, we just won’t know, and diminish our collective ability to argue that it’s a problem. We also will lose the ability to know when we’re in growth, or periods of decline. It’s just bad news.

There is very good reason to think that ASPPH’s annual graduation data alone will not let us characterize how many graduates are coming from public health degrees. In the before time, I worked with colleagues at ASPPH to try and determine why data reported to ASPPH did not comport with what was reported to the National Center for Education Statistics. What did we find?

“For the 25-year study period (1992-2016), ASPPH data indicated 172 397 public health degree conferrals from ASPPH-member CEPH-accredited schools and programs of public health. NCES data for the same period indicated 209 180 public health degree conferrals from all institutions. The composite estimate, taking the greater of ASPPH-member data or NCES data by institution and year, put the total number of conferrals at 247 909 from 1992 through 2016.”  – Public Health Reports, 2018

In the years since, ASPPH membership has grown, but so too has the number of institutions that report awarding a public health degree. Thousands of our graduates are from institutions who are not members of ASPPH. The fundamental question of ‘how many graduates do we have?’ persists.

It is exceptionally bad that DHS chose not to classify all public health graduates as STEM graduates, despite several requests. Grads meet the criteria^[1], and are harmed with the lack of designation.  Especially international students. And so it makes sense for individual actors to try and do what they see as best for their students, and perhaps their application numbers will also benefit. But registrars misrepresenting their public health program as Biomed, General – or any other generic STEM degree – for the sake of a designation lends itself to inequitable competition, and will hurt our field in the long run.

Masters of Biomedical Sciences, General just doesn’t have the same ring to us.

^[1] Consider, also some select STEM CIP Codes: 13.0601-Educational Evaluation and Research, 30.7001-Data Science, General, 30.7101-Data Analytics, General, 30.7103-Data Visualization, 52.1301-Management Science 11.0801-Web Page, Digital/Multimedia and Information Resources Design

JP Leider, PhD, is the Director of the Center for Public Health Systems at the University of Minnesota School of Public Health, and a member of the JPHMP Editorial Board. He is available at leider (at) umn (dot) edu.

Heather Krasna, PhD, EdM, MS, is Associate Dean of Career and Professional Development at Columbia University School of Public Health and a co-author of the book 101+ Careers in Public Health (3rd Ed.). She is a public health workforce researcher, consultant, and advocate, and career development specialist.