51.22 Public Health · SOC 21-1091
⚠⚠⚠ The job most students picture when they say public health is the smallest one in the federal data. Epidemiologists: 12,300 employed in the whole country, about 800 openings a year, and entry is effectively 100% graduate. The jobs are in health education (71,800, $64,070) and community health work (65,100, $51,850, high-school entry). ⚠⚠ Florida's own numbers say the same thing from the other side — 579 master's degrees against 560 bachelor's, at just 8 institutions, every one a university.
| Role | SOC | 2025 median | Employed | Openings/yr | Growth 2024–34 | Entry |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Health education specialist | 21-1091 | $64,070 | 71,800 | 7,900 | faster than average (5–6%) | bachelor's |
| Community health worker | 21-1094 | $51,850 | 65,100 | 7,800 | ✅ much faster (7%+) | ⚠ high school |
| ⚠⚠ Epidemiologist | 19-1041 | $87,220 | ⚠⚠ 12,300 | ⚠⚠⚠ 800 | ✅ much faster (7%+) | ⚠ 67% master's, 22% post-doc, 11% doctorate |
⚠⚠⚠ Read the epidemiologist row carefully before choosing this field for that reason. Twelve thousand three hundred people hold the job in the entire United States, and about eight hundred positions open a year. It pays well, it is growing fast, and there is almost none of it — and every route in requires a graduate degree.
⚠⚠ That is not an argument against public health. It is an argument for knowing which job you are aiming at. Health education and community health work together employ 137,000 people and open about 15,700 positions a year — nearly twenty times the epidemiology figure.
| Source | Entry education for health education specialists |
|---|---|
| BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook | ✅ bachelor's degree |
| ⚠ O*NET respondent survey | ⚠ 62% said associate degree, 31% bachelor's |
⚠ They do not agree, so this page quotes both. BLS reports the typical entry level; O*NET reports what its respondents said their own job required, and those are different questions. The credential sides with BLS — CHES requires a bachelor's at minimum — so plan on the degree and treat the O*NET figure as evidence that some employers hire below it.
⚠ The two sources also use different projection decades: BLS projects 6% growth and about 6,900 annual openings for 2025–35; O*NET reports 5–6% and 7,900 for 2024–34. Same picture, different vintage.
First, the degrees awarded (IPEDS, general public health, 2023):
| Level | Credentials |
|---|---|
| ⚠⚠ Master's | ⚠⚠ 579 |
| Bachelor's | 560 |
| Research doctorate | 44 |
⚠⚠⚠ The master's outnumbers the bachelor's — which happens in no other programme on this site.
Second, the courses. Of the 18 PHC courses carried by four or more Florida public institutions, 14 are graduate. Only three undergraduate PHC numbers reach four carriers at all.
⚠⚠ So treat the MPH as the normal terminal credential and the bachelor's as the first half, and budget for it from the start rather than discovering it in your final year.
A student who searches the PHC prefix finds a graduate catalogue and reasonably concludes there is no undergraduate route. There is — it is filed under HSC:
| Course | FL institutions |
|---|---|
HSC4500 Epidemiology | 9 — ⚠ five of them STATE COLLEGES |
HSC4730 Public Health Research | 7 |
HSC3032 Foundations of Public Health | 5 |
HSC3661 Communication Theory and Practice for Health | 5 |
PHC2100 Introduction to Public Health | 5 |
⚠ Search both prefixes, and register by number.
| Public health | Health care administration | |
|---|---|---|
| FL public institutions | ⚠ 8 | 24 |
| Sector | ⚠⚠ all universities | ✅ 20 state colleges carry upper division |
| Median of the target job | $64,070 | $123,860 |
⚠⚠ These two subjects overlap considerably at the policy end and are not equally reachable. If staying at a state college matters — and for a working adult it usually does — that is a real constraint and it should be part of the decision, not a discovery.
CHES does not require a health education major. It requires a bachelor's plus 25 semester credits addressing NCHEC's Nine Areas of Responsibility, at C or better, distributed as:
⚠⚠⚠ The ceiling on topic courses is the part that catches people. Nutrition, substance use, sexual health and chronic disease are the interesting courses and they are the capped ones. You must deliberately take the programme-planning and evaluation coursework, and it is the part nobody chooses for fun.
⚠ Do this in your first term: get the Nine Areas from NCHEC, map your catalogue onto them, and count. It is a spreadsheet, and on a path where most advice is vague, it is a number.
⚠⚠⚠ Decide early whether you are aiming at epidemiology. If you are, plan the master's or doctorate from the beginning, load up on statistics and quantitative methods, and accept that you are competing for about 800 openings a year nationally. If you are not, say so — and aim at health education or community health, where the jobs are.
⚠⚠ Count your CHES credits from term one. Twenty-five, at least twelve of them process courses, maximum nine topic. It is the single most concrete thing you can do on this path.
⚠ Budget for the MPH. In Florida the master's outnumbers the bachelor's in this field; treat it as the norm and check the programme's CEPH status with CEPH.
⚠ Check availability before you commit. Eight institutions, all universities. If you need a state college, look hard at health care administration or health information management instead — both overlap and both are far more widely taught.
And get into a health department, a federally qualified health centre or a community organisation early, in any capacity. This is a field where a graduate with two years of real community work beats a graduate with a better transcript, and the CHES coursework assumes you have seen a programme run.
A program is a field of study, one level above a degree — each page says which degrees it covers and which Florida institutions award them. ⚠ The count is institutions that awarded a credential in the field in 2023; it is not a promise that a school runs this exact degree, and it counts something different from the course-based list further down.
Programs worth knowing about if you are considering this career — ⚠ they do not lead to it. Each row says what it is and is not.
Careers filed under the same broad field in the federal classification (HEALTH PROFESSIONS AND RELATED PROGRAMS) — often they share early coursework, and each row says which group it is filed in. ⚠ Worth reading BEFORE you commit: switching between neighbours is cheap early and expensive late.
See every career in HEALTH PROFESSIONS AND RELATED PROGRAMS →
Selected, not exhaustive — the courses specific to this path plus the foundations it is built on. A course number does not identify a course in Florida: always check your own institution's catalog and take a syllabus to an adviser.
39 Florida public institutions teach courses on this path. The count is how many of the 15 listed courses each one carries — it shows where the path is best covered. It is not a statement that a school offers this as a degree; for that, check the institution’s own programme list.
Requirements change. These are the authorities that decide them — check them directly before committing to a route.
Last updated 23 September 2026.