Research methodology

Workflow

1. Discover an institution or program. The accredited-program directory of the Council on Education for Public Health (CEPH), the Association of Schools and Programs of Public Health (ASPPH) and institutional catalogs are used to find leads. A directory lead is never a source for a published fact.
2. Verify identity and operation on the institution’s own website, including that it publishes current information. Closed institutions are excluded.
3. Confirm the campus: the place where teaching takes place, not an administrative office. Online programs have no teaching location and are never counted as present in a state or city.
4. Confirm the program on its own official page.
5. Classify the qualification: the exact award title as published (for example MPH, MSPH, DrPH, BSPH), the level, and whether the program is a dedicated public health program, a formally named public health concentration within a broader degree, or a related population-health discipline. Official award names are never relabeled.
6. Record the subject (epidemiology, biostatistics, health policy and so on) only where the official program page names a specialization or formal concentration, never for a single elective.
7. Extract delivery and schedule: on campus, hybrid, online with campus visits, or fully online; required campus time; full-time or part-time; live or recorded teaching. Practicum and field placements are recorded separately from campus attendance.
8. Extract admission requirements, including the GRE policy, as published.
9. Extract tuition in US dollars with its basis (per credit, per term, per year or whole program), the residency category it applies to and the academic year. Mandatory fees and application fees are separate lines.
10. Save sources: the page address and a short verbatim quote for each fact, with the date it was checked. A script re-fetches the pages and checks that each quote is still present; facts whose quote cannot be found are withheld or downgraded.
11. Withhold any fact that cannot be confirmed. A withheld fact is shown as not published or not confirmed, not filled in from memory or from a third-party site.
12. Deduplicate and publish after review. Every research step is written to a research log.

Who is included

US colleges and universities with a dedicated public health degree or academic certificate, a formally named public health major or concentration within a broader degree, or a related population-health discipline that the institution places within a public health school, department or curriculum. Public and private institutions, in-person and online programs, are eligible.

Excluded: programs where public health appears only as an occasional elective, non-academic training courses and unverified coaching offers, and closed institutions.

Accreditation

Specialized public health accreditation (CEPH accredits schools and programs of public health) and institutional accreditation (the whole college or university, by a regional or national accreditor) are different things. We store them separately, each with its scope, its status and the date it was checked. Specialized accreditation covers the named school or program only, not every degree at the university.

A CEPH record names what is accredited (for example a school of public health, a public health program or a standalone baccalaureate program). It is linked to an individual program only by explicit rules: a school-level record is linked to programs whose department is that school; a program-level record is linked to the MPH; a baccalaureate record is linked to the one bachelor’s program with public health in its award. Anything else stays unit-wide and is shown with its scope, not assumed to cover a degree. Printed accreditation terms can be out of date: check ceph.org.

Applicant and candidate status is not accreditation: it is shown as the status it is and is never displayed as accredited. If an accreditation record cannot be confirmed from an official source it is shown as not confirmed.

GRE policy

GRE policy categories are kept separate: required, not required, optional, waiver available, and not published. Optional and waiver-available are not the same as not required, and a missing statement is recorded as not published, never read as “not required”.

Not published and not confirmed

We use two different labels. Not published means the institution’s official pages do not state the fact. Not confirmed means we could not verify it, for example because a page was unreachable or sources conflict. Neither is a statement that the fact is false.

Geography

Programs are placed by the state and city of their teaching campus. Every state, Washington, DC and the territories have their own page, so a state with no listing is visibly a research gap and not a statement that no program exists there. City pages list actual campuses only. We do not claim complete coverage: the directory lists the institutions we have researched and verified so far. See the states pages for what is currently listed.

Costs

We show tuition with its basis, residency category and academic year. We do not rank by price or compare a per-credit price with a whole-program price. Where an institution does not publish a price we say “not published”. Published tuition is not the total cost of study or the price any individual student will pay.

Editorial selections: how “best” pages are made

The Best Public Health Colleges pages and the other “best” pages are unranked editorial selections, not league tables. There are no ranking numbers, no invented scores and no acceptance-rate or outcome data. Each page states what was considered, the review date and its limitations. The criteria are documented on each page and applied to every program in the same way: a program is included only if a verified CEPH record names it and at least four (two for bachelor’s programs) of the documented evidence items are found on official pages, using only evidence published on official pages. A good program that publishes little can therefore be missed. Selections are a starting point for your own research, not a verdict.

Sponsorship is separate

Sponsorship has no influence on inclusion, verification, accreditation display, results order or editorial selections. Paid placements are labeled and sit in their own slots; see the sponsorship disclosure.

What we do not do

• We do not invent institutions, programs, accreditation, tuition, scholarships, reviews, rankings or scores.
• We do not publish acceptance rates, salaries, job placement or graduation outcomes unless an official source states them, and we do not imply that any program leads to a particular job or license.
• We do not bypass bot protection or access restrictions. Where an official page or register could not be reached, the record says so.

Limits

Coverage is incomplete and uneven by state. Facts are checked at a point in time and can change afterwards. Quotes are re-checked by script, but a script cannot judge whether a page has been reworded in a way that changes its meaning; editors review failures. If you find an error, see corrections.

Freshness

Tuition, deadlines, test policies and accreditation status change. Each record shows when it was last checked; past deadlines are shown as past and are never moved forward.