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 scheduled for 2026, and we are beginning to gather information and feedback from partners to inform the revision process.
All accredited PHP and SPH offer an MPH degree, and the Council is beginning the criteria revision process by considering the MPH curriculum—specifically, the foundational competencies required for all MPH degrees. At this time, the Council wishes to share some guiding principles that the Council has agreed upon, in principle, for addressing MPH curricula in the upcoming criteria revision process.
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.
We look forward to receiving your feedback via the survey. My colleagues and I will be pleased to answer any questions.
Sincerely,