I completely agree about the factors you think I should consider 🙂 I am very interested in Boston/Atlanta schools for that reason (Boston is probably the public health capital of the country after Atlanta).
Thank you for your encouraging words about Harvard 🙂
I never thought about there being a public health capital of the country! It all really depends on what you want to do and where you might want to live, obviously all regions of the country have public health systems and a need for public health in some way or another. I wouldn't rely too heavily on rankings for public health school, tbh, as these can get skewed towards metropolitian schools clustered in a region. I'd say the following with regards to public health centers:
1. Emory/Atlanta, good reputation for epidemiology/global health/history as a major public health hub.
2. Tulane, great history in public health, epidemiology, other strengths
3. Washington D.C. GWU/JHU (relatively close by), great for international NGO/policy type of work,
4. UNC one of the best, if not the best public health school
5. University of Washington Seattle, major local regional hub of public health
6. Boston area schools, obviously like Harvard, Tufts (good for nutrition related stuff), BU, U of Mass and probably others, high density of schools, moderately strong regionally, Harvard might stand out.
7. University of Minnesota, obviously a great regional school.
8. Hidden gems like USF, Brown, and many others!
9. CA schools like UCLA, Berkely, So-Cal is the major Biotech hub in the country
10. Columbia for policy, health management
ALSO . . . there are plenty of people who do an online MPH from a non-brand name school and get a great job. Everybody's list of a dream school is different, I would go with in order of preference:
Emory, UNC, JHU, Tulane, USF, Seattle may even pass up ALL of these over a lesser known school if they were doing something I was interested in like studying rheumatic heart disease in indigenous Australians or something like that.
Even so . . . don't go nuts looking at rankings, if you do a good job at Brown/USF in a specialized field you like, you'll probably be better off than going to a high density area like Boston and getting lost in the crowd. The added benefit of going to a "prestigious" school in terms of undergrad admissions might mean much less at the graduate level. Like if you needed a license/certificate to operate construction equipment, you wouldn't necessary say, "I'm going to the Harvard school of technician/driver of construction equipment even though I'll pay 5 times what I'd pay in my state", at some point an MPH is an MPH. I think more important is what hard skills you get out of an MPH, and if you can the find the research/experience you want at a school. Public health schools draw on the strengths of other departments, and much of the education is probably similar among schools.