I am approaching this question from your stated concentration of HPM, NYU's Robert F. Wagner School of Public Service is big on policy and has been around since 1938, and they award and MPA in HPM, you might think this doesn't apply to their HPM concentration the MPH, but i am thinking that NYU has great experience and reputation in this area. NYU themselves don't draw a super big distinction between the MPH with an HPM concentration, an MPA or MHA as there is some, perhaps a lot, of overlap.
NYU has connections, so I'm thinking that's a benefit, even if they grew their global health program too fast and it is more of a business/connections type of degree program. Columbia is mentioned favorably as a good school for HPM as well, and New York has a lot of opportunities in terms of global health and the business side of health policy.
Decades ago BU's public health school came out with a study basically saying that patients aren't getting addicted to opioid prescriptions, and this study was wrong, or done incorrectly, and quoted hundreds of thousands of times and lead to a perception that feed into the current opioid epidemic. More recently, BU's public health school through a professor who once (but no longer) worked at the CDC has forcefully advocated for not regulating e-cigarettes (the guy regularly posts on his blog and apparently is part of the public relations wing of BUSPH), which may help adults quit, and are possibly 95% safer than cigarettes, though the jury is still out on that, but may be more worrisome regarding children who are increasingly vaping at their schools. Interestingly, Boston is often ranked as the city in America with the biggest binge drinking problem!, not that that necessarily has anything to do with the above possible policy missteps.
So . . . why is there a fake news blog by a BUSPH Professor promoting e-cigarrettes, and more disturbingly demonizes everyone from the NIH to JHU for raising questions about e-cigarettes and asking for longterm studies? It looks like this is some how funded by e-cigarettes manufacturers, these manufacturers give scholarships for students who tell how much they enjoy e-cigarettes, there might be a similar scholarship at BUSPH. Some quotes from the blog:
"It is also inappropriate to call Juul a massive public health disaster. True, Juul is a major problem because it is leading to widespread youth use with a significant potential for addiction." . . .
"Finally, it is irresponsible and inappropriate to accuse Juul of "willfully designing and pushing a product that will cause harm to the children of the United States." First of all, Juul did not design the product with the intention of causing harm to children. The product was designed to help adult smokers quit smoking."
Really?!? It doesn't matter that Juul was created to "help adult smokers quit smoking", now a lot of kids are using this products and other products, he seems much more concerned about protecting the image of this company (which might be paying him or he believes in a massive conspiracy theory involving people maliciously attacking Juul) than he care about the health of children! If you want to do anything regarding the health of kids and moms, two vulnerable populations, don't go to BU for public health school, they're not on the side of kids. If the science and research shows that e-cigarettes are a problem, perhaps bigger than people thought, then you have to go with the science not believe that everything is a conspiracy theory. It is also more than possible that Juul manufacturers, like cigarettes manufacturers before them, know/knew that children buy their products, become long-term users, and help their bottom-line. If there is a Scooby-Do Cotton Candy Juul flavored nicotine do you think it was invented to help adults quit smoking?
If BUSPH is simultaneously getting money from e-cigarette manufacturers, (and given that they pushed hard to de-regulate e-cigarettes and amazingly won with the e-cigarettes manufacturers) and then . . . some of their researchers (not conspiracy theoretist guy) getting research funds from the NIH to study the harmful effects of e-cigarettes . . . did they just help to create a problem that they get paid to research?
There might be issues with getting externships in Boston, they've had problems in the past apparently, and there are several big public health schools like Harvard, Tufts, BU and UMass all competing for the same opportunities.
BU's public health school is relatively new, especially when compared to NYU's public policy school, and other schools of public health, and according to what students have said about the school: the students can be super competitive, it is easier to get lost in the crowd at BU than at many other places, students might be treated with indifference . . . and of course the official advertising works hard to create the opposite impression as they want to correct this image through marketing.
