CEPH Procedures indicate that criteria will be revised every five years or more often as required. The next five-year revision of CEPH’s Accreditation Criteria for Schools and Programs of Public Health is underway.
CEPH is addressing criteria and gathering feedback by topic area before releasing a full document for review and comment. This process will allow for focused review of key elements over time.
The Council hopes to release a full draft of the revised criteria for comment in 2026 and will review comments thoroughly before adopting revised criteria. Multiple comment periods will be used if needed. Criteria implementation typically takes place in the two years following adoption.
This tentative timeline will be updated as needed.
Index by topic area
| Topic/Criterion | Current Status | Next Steps |
|---|---|---|
| MPH Foundational Competencies | Survey completed in early 2025; results available for review below | Goal: revised draft of MPH foundational competencies available for public comment before the end of 2025 |
| DrPH Foundational Competencies | Survey open through July 9, 2025; link available below | Council will review survey results in early September 2025 |
| Public Health Bachelor's Degrees | Adopted revised SBP Accreditation Criteria in December 2024 | SBP criteria B1-B6 will replace current SPH/PHP criteria D9-D12 |
Guiding principles for upcoming revisions to MPH curricular criteria
This is a statement of the Council’s current intention and may be revised as necessary based on our conversations with the field.
1) We will revise MPH curricular criteria, as needed, to reflect the evolution of public health knowledge and practice over the last decade and current workforce needs.
2) Revisions to MPH foundational competency statements are intended to be sufficiently modest to allow most accredited units to preserve their current foundational curricula if they wish to do so. As curricular revisions are needed to comply with criteria revisions (e.g., adding instruction and assessment for a substantively new foundational competency), we hope to create an opportunity for units to be innovative and integrate revisions across courses to respond to current public health practice needs.
3) To the extent possible, we hope to maintain the current number of required MPH foundational competencies, rather than increasing the number of competencies that must be assessed. For any new foundational competencies added in the revision process, we would strive to remove current competencies.
While there is no special significance to the current number of statements (22 competencies), we want to be responsive to units’ interest in keeping the number of competencies manageable to ensure appropriate instruction and assessment of each.
We acknowledge that the revision may identify a need to break apart existing competency statements for clarity (i.e., addressing compound statements); this could result in a numeric increase to the competency list but would not increase the number of substantive requirements.
CEPH criteria will continue to define a baseline for the content in public health curricula, while allowing accredited units discretion to define additional requirements that serve their missions and communities. Units will remain free, as they are now, to incorporate additional content into their concentration competencies or to require more foundational competencies than the minimum defined in CEPH criteria.
4) We expect to preserve the basic architecture of requirements for an MPH degree: foundational knowledge, foundational competencies, concentration competencies, applied practice experience, and integrative learning experience.
CEPH seeks to gather information to inform our revision of the DrPH foundational competencies.
Please complete this survey on DrPH foundational competencies by July 9, 2025 and share the survey with your colleagues, DrPH students and graduates, and practice partners who employ or supervise DrPH students.