Public Health at Adrian College
Offered in either a Business Minor or Bachelor of Science, Public Health is the science and art of preventing disease, prolonging life, and promoting human health through organized efforts and informed choices.
And, it can also be a promising career path as the median salary for a healthcare administrator is over $104,000 per year.
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Public Health Highlights
The Public Health program is intended to prepare students for a wide range of career options including Healthcare Administrator, Health and Safety Engineer, Environmental Specialist, and Health Educator. It's great for students who want to be involved in healthcare but aren't pursuing medicine directly.
Furthermore, it provides students with a pathway to graduate programs in Public Health and Epidemiology.
Developed with the World Health Organization
We collaborated with world leaders to help develop this curriculum.
Median Salary of $104,000+
Healthcare Administrators earn a median salary of $104,280 and expect a 32% job growth this decade.
Hybrid Learning Options
Some courses in this program are taken online & powered by Rize. The core curriculum will be taken on-campus, giving students the best of student life with the flexibility of some online learning.



Program Details
Information on what you'll learn, how the degree is built, and the careers that are possible after graduation.
Why Public Health Matters
Ebola. Avian Flu. Tuberculosis. CoronaVirus (COVID-19). HIV/AIDS. Malaria. When people think of public health, these are the names that come to mind, and indeed, with our increasingly interconnected world, the spread of epidemic diseases is a major public health issue.
However, Public Health is much more than mere crisis response. Public Health is the science and art of preventing disease, prolonging life, and promoting human health through organized efforts and informed choices. It covers a wide range of sociological, scientific and mathematical approaches and seeks to improve standards of living, affect healthcare policy, and prevent the looming crises that stem from issues such as Antibiotic Resistance.
Faculty Contributors
Dr. Russell "Skip" Barbour - Dr. Russell "Skip" Barbour is the former Associate Director for Research Methods and Analysis at the Center for Interdisciplinary Research on AIDS (CIRA). He currently serves as a faculty member within Yale's School of Public Health (Biostatistics) and was previously the Co-Director of Data Management and Statistical Analysis at CIRA. He earned his PhD from Yale University in Human Ecology.
Dr. Ajay Rangaraj - Dr. Ajay Rangaraj is a practicing physician and a consultant to the department of HIV, Hepatitis and STIs at the World Health Organization, Geneva. He played a pivotal role in developing the current WHO guidelines for treating HIV and communicating that information to world governments. Dr. Rangaraj is also a graduate of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, with a MSc in Public Health. He is the primary creator of the Public Health Major.
Dr. Charles Severance, University of Michigan - Dr. Charles Severance holds a PhD in Computer Science from Michigan State University. He is the former Executive Director of the Sakai Foundation, and one of the world’s leading online CS educators. His contributions and curriculum form the basis of our programming curriculum
How does this degree align with the real world?
Forever Labs was our corporate partner in the development of this program. They're an Ann Arbor-based Biomedical company that seeks to preserve and extend healthy human life through the preservation and reintroduction of an individual’s stem cells.
Career Outlook
The Public Health Major intends to prepare students for a wide range of career options including:
- Healthcare Administrator (Med. Salary: $99,730, 10-yr growth: 18%)
- Health and Safety Engineer ($89,130, 5%)
- Environmental Specialist ($71,130, 8%)
- Health Educator ($46,080, 11%)
- (Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics).
Curriculum Highlights
In addition to a strong liberal arts background, epidemiology, and certain topics from sociology, anthropology, and political science, we identified the following priorities:
- An understanding of health systems and the ramifications of politics on said systems.
- A strong background in quantitative studies, including Statistics, Probability, and Data Analytics.
- A foundation in the social sciences, including economics, anthropology, and sociology.
- An understanding of qualitative and mixed research methods.
- A deeper exploration of the role economics plays within public health.
About the Partnership
For more information on the innovative partnership that allows us to offer this program, visit this page.
Start Your Application Today
You can begin your application in as little as two minutes, for free & online.
Frequently Asked Questions
Common questions about Public Health.
Most healthcare jobs require a bachelor’s, and having a degree in Public Health provides a massive advantage in earning potential and salary. People with a bachelor’s degree also have a 50% lower rate of unemployment, and on average they make an additional $630,000 to $900,000 over their lifetime, even more in high growth fields like this one.
Yes! The only way to make sure our program gives you the skills you need to get hired and teaches you to work through real-world problems that actually matter is to partner with the people out there who are actually doing it. Our collaboration with Fortune 500 companies and subject matter experts means that their multi-billion-dollar expertise is reflected in everything you’ll study here.
Public Health is huge, and our graduates can use their coveted skills to secure many different kinds of high-growth employment. If the idea of helping facilitate a process that serves a large number of patients appeals to you, you may want to work as a healthcare administrator. If you want to play a role in preventing the next pandemic, you may point towards landing a job in public health policy. Our program is also an excellent path for pre-meds! As a Public Health grad, the high-paying possibilities available to you are essentially endless.
If you are interested in learning how to prevent sickness and disease in communities, if you have a passion for helping people live healthy and fulfilling lives, if you are looking for a degree that opens a ton of doors to different high-growth careers, if you want to have a job that never gets boring, and if you want to gain a skill set that makes you more and more valuable as your career progresses, you should consider this major.
Flexibility. Optional Synchronous means our Public Health courses can be attended together at one time with other students, or on your own schedule. Many students prefer the learning that comes with live interactions, while other students love the flexibility of doing them whenever they fit into their schedule.
This major is part of an exclusive partnership between Adrian College and Rize Education, which means you’ll be learning with students from your campus, as well as students from a selective consortium of schools across the country. The goal is to help you begin building a national network of people in your industry before you’ve even graduated.
A flipped classroom is one where the focus is not on lectures, but on discussion, projects, and problem-solving. Students in flipped classrooms get the chance for more instructor feedback, and as a result have been found to learn much, much faster.