a doctor's degree in public health is more popular than many other degrees. In fact, it ranks #32 out of 306 on popularity of all such degrees in the nation. As a result, there are many college that offer the degree, making your choice of school a hard one.
For its 2025 ranking, College Factual looked at 10 schools in the Southeast Region to determine which ones were the best for public health students pursuing a doctor's degree. When you put them all together, these colleges and universities awarded 238 doctor's degrees in public health during the 2022-2023 academic year.
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Choosing a Great Public Health School for Your Doctor's Degree
Your choice of public health for getting your doctor's degree school matters. Important measures of a quality public health program can vary widely even among the top schools. To make it into this list, a school must excel in the following areas.
A Great Overall School
A school that excels in educating for a particular major and degree level must be a great school overall as well. To account for this we include a college's overall Best Colleges for a Doctor's Degree ranking which itself looks at a collection of various factors like degree completion, educational resources, student body caliber and post-graduation earnings for the school as a whole.
Early-Career Earnings
One measure we use to determine the quality of a school is to look at the average salary of doctorate graduates during the early years of their career. This is because one of the main reasons people pursue their doctor's degree is to enable themselves to find better-paying positions.
Other Factors We Consider
The metrics below are just some of the other metrics that we use to determine our rankings.
Major Focus - How many resources a school devotes to public health students as compared to other majors.
Major Demand - How many other public health students want to attend this school to pursue a doctor's degree.
Educational Resources - How many resources are allocated to students. These resources may include educational expenditures per student, number of students per instructor, and graduation rate among other things.
Student Debt - How much debt public health students go into to obtain their doctor's degree and how well they are able to pay back that debt.
Accreditation - Whether a school is regionally accredited and/or accredited by a recognized public health related body.
Our full ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best schools for public health students working on their doctor's degree.
The public health school you choose to invest your time and money in matters. To help you make the decision that is right for you, we've developed a number of major-specific rankings, including this list of the Best Public Health Doctor's Degree Schools in the Southeast Region.
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Every student who is interested in a doctor's degree in public health has to check out University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Located in the city of Chapel Hill, UNC Chapel Hill is a public university with a very large student population.
Doctorate students who receive their degree from the public health program make an average of $89,362 for their early career.
University of South Carolina - Columbia is a wonderful decision for students interested in a doctor's degree in public health. Located in the midsize city of Columbia, UofSC is a public university with a very large student population.
Doctorate recipients from the public health degree program at University of South Carolina - Columbia earn $10,684 more than the typical graduate in this field when they enter the workforce.
Located in the large city of Tampa, USF Tampa is a public university with a fairly large student population.
Doctorate recipients from the public health program at University of South Florida - Main Campus earn $8,627 above the typical college grad with the same degree when they enter the workforce.
The bars on the spread charts above show the distribution of the schools on this list +/- one standard deviation from the mean.
The Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), a branch of the U.S. Department of Education (DOE) serves as the core of the rest of our data about colleges.
Some other college data, including much of the graduate earnings data, comes from the U.S. Department of Education’s (College Scorecard).
by our College Data Analytics Team
Your choice of public health for getting your doctor's degree school matters. Important measures of a quality public health program can vary widely even among the top schools. To make it into this list, a school must excel in the following areas.
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