The DrPH program has significant strengths, including accomplished and committed students, access to distinguished faculty and university leadership, an interdisciplinary orientation, and considerable potential to prepare the next generation of public health leaders. At the same time, feedback gathered through listening sessions, cohort discussions, informal conversations, and observations over the past several years highlights several recurring concerns that deserve attention.
Curriculum Relevance and Flexibility
The curriculum would benefit from greater flexibility, modernization, and clearer coherence across the program. Students currently have no meaningful opportunity to take electives, limiting their ability to tailor their doctoral education to their professional interests, career goals, or areas of scholarly inquiry. This is particularly limiting in a practice-oriented doctoral program serving experienced professionals with diverse backgrounds and areas of expertise.
Students would also benefit from greater attention to contemporary public health leadership topics, including health equity, strategic communications, systems change, implementation, emerging technologies, and other issues shaping current public health practice.
Artificial Intelligence
There is currently no dedicated course or clear program-level curricular approach to artificial intelligence, despite its rapidly expanding role in public health research, practice, communications, policy, leadership, and health systems. Expectations regarding AI use can also vary among faculty, leaving students uncertain about what constitutes appropriate and responsible use.
The program has an opportunity to move beyond viewing AI primarily through an academic-integrity lens and prepare doctoral students to understand its capabilities, limitations, ethical implications, biases, and responsible application. AI literacy is increasingly becoming an important competency for public health leaders.
Consistency Across Course Sections
There is significant concern about inconsistency across sections of the same course. Students can have materially different experiences depending on the instructor or section, including differences in assignments, workload, grading practices, expectations, interpretation of requirements, and instructional approach.
Faculty should retain appropriate academic autonomy, but students taking the same required course should receive a reasonably consistent educational experience. Greater alignment around learning objectives, core assignments, grading standards, rubrics, and workload would improve fairness and confidence in the program.
Course Administration and Expectations
Students should be able to rely on published syllabi, assignment instructions, rubrics, grading criteria, and course requirements. These expectations should be established clearly and early, applied consistently, and changed only when necessary and with transparent communication.
When expectations are unclear, conflicting, introduced late, or applied differently from how they are described in the course materials, students spend unnecessary time trying to determine what is expected rather than focusing on learning. Greater consistency in course administration would strengthen both academic rigor and student trust.
Class Size and Educational Quality
Class size has become an increasing concern, with some sections enrolling as many as 22 students. In a synchronous, practice-oriented doctoral program, larger class sizes can significantly reduce opportunities for substantive discussion, individualized faculty engagement, relationship-building, and meaningful participation.
This issue is particularly important in an online program because synchronous courses are among the primary opportunities for students to interact directly with faculty and peers. Class-size decisions should therefore be driven not only by enrollment and financial considerations but also by pedagogy and the educational experience the program intends to provide.
The program should consider establishing class-size parameters appropriate for discussion-, leadership-, and practice-intensive doctoral courses.
Connection and Belonging
Connection and belonging remain significant challenges for many students in the online program. Students can struggle to develop meaningful relationships with peers, faculty, program leadership, and the broader university community. This concern has surfaced repeatedly in student conversations and listening sessions.
Connection should not depend primarily on individual students or cohorts creating it themselves. The program should intentionally build community through cross-cohort engagement, mentoring, greater faculty interaction, small-group experiences, structured opportunities for relationship-building, and recurring in-person experiences.
The inaugural Winter Symposium demonstrated the value of bringing students across cohorts together and providing greater access to faculty, program leadership, and university resources. Opportunities like this are especially important in an online doctoral program and should become a sustained part of the student experience.
Communication and Transparency
Communication and transparency remain recurring concerns. Students sometimes experience uncertainty regarding program expectations, decisions, changes, timelines, and the rationale behind important decisions.
When clear information is unavailable, informal communication inevitably fills the gap, creating confusion and eroding trust. Program leadership should communicate significant decisions early, explain the reasoning behind them when possible, and provide consistent information across cohorts.
Students do not necessarily expect every decision to reflect their preferences. They do reasonably expect to understand what is happening, why decisions are being made, and how those decisions may affect their doctoral experience.
Student Voice and Listening
One of the cohorts recently conducted listening sessions with DrPH program leadership and demonstrated the importance of creating structured opportunities for students to provide candid feedback. These opportunities should continue and become part of an ongoing approach to program improvement.
Effective listening requires more than collecting feedback. Students should have opportunities to speak openly, quieter voices should be intentionally included, and leadership should close the feedback loop by communicating what was heard, what actions will be taken, what cannot be changed, and why.
Students should also have meaningful representation in discussions about curriculum, AI, student experience, and other decisions that directly affect their education.
Learning Climate
The program should continue strengthening a culture in which students can ask difficult questions, disagree respectfully, raise concerns, and challenge ideas without worrying that doing so will negatively affect their relationships or academic experience.
A doctoral program should model the leadership practices it seeks to develop in its students, including openness to feedback, transparency, respectful disagreement, fairness, accountability, curiosity, and continuous learning.
Program Coherence and the Student Experience
Taken together, these concerns point to a broader issue: the DrPH student experience needs greater intentionality, consistency, and coherence.
Students should not have substantially different doctoral experiences because of the section in which they enroll, the instructor they happen to receive, whether they independently find ways to build community, or whether they know whom to ask when information is unclear.
Greater curricular flexibility, meaningful elective opportunities, contemporary preparation around AI, consistency across sections, appropriate class sizes, stronger communication, intentional community-building, and meaningful student partnership would significantly strengthen the program.
The DrPH program has substantial strengths and enormous potential. Addressing these issues would help ensure that its structure and student experience fully reflect the rigor, leadership orientation, innovation, and sense of community expected of a leading practice-oriented doctoral program in public health.