If you want to earn your public health degree in North Carolina, you’ll have strong options to choose from. If you want to earn your public health degree near Raleigh, NC, you’ll have fewer options, depending on how you define “near.”
North Carolina is a state that’s been disproportionately hit by wealth inequality along racial, regional, and educational lines. While many of the states metropolitan areas like Raleigh are flourishing, nearby rural residents are suffering high rates of unemployment, poverty, and devastating public health issues. Some of the largest public health issues facing North Carolinians are tobacco use, cancer, heart disease, stroke, chronic lung disease, obesity, diabetes, and Alzheimer’s disease.
When you earn a public health degree in North Carolina, or close to Raleigh, you can help to correct these issues by working toward tobacco use prevention, preventing obesity, and expanding access to care services. You can also work on bettering adolescent health and lowering infant mortality rates when working in public health.
Our ranking of The 5 Best Public Health Degree Programs in North Carolina explores top North Carolina public health degrees. The following is a list of the universities in the ranking along with their distances from Raleigh:
- UNC at Chapel Hill is 27 miles away from Raleigh (approximately a half-hour drive).
- Elon University is 63 miles away from Raleigh (approximately an hour drive).
- Appalachian State University is 189 miles away from Raleigh (approximately a three-hour drive away).
- East Carolina University is 84 miles away from Raleigh (approximately an hour and 20 minutes drive away).
- UNC at Greensboro is around 80 miles away from Raleigh (approximately a one and a quarter-hour drive away).
Remember, if you’re earning your degree online, you don’t necessarily need to be near Raleigh to enjoy a public health degree conveyed from a local school. If you’re looking to earn an on-campus public health degree near Raleigh because you want to work for a local public health organization, it makes more sense to confine your search to schools in the area.
Searching for a public health degree can be daunting, and it’s easy to get bogged down in micro-details. If you’re overwhelmed or struggling to identify what you need in a public health degree, a few questions you can ask yourself are:
- What do you consider an affordable price for a public health degree?
- What are your time constraints for studying daily, weekly, and overall?
- Which format best suits your learning style and schedule; online, on-campus, or a hybrid format?
- What are your career goals in the public health field?
- Would a specific public health program specialization help you accomplish your public health career goals?
- Does where you want to live and work effect which public health programs you are able to consider?
Once you have your own set of criteria figured out for what you desire from your public health program, it will be easier to find the schools in North Carolina or near Raleigh which fit your specific standards. Browsing rankings for public health degrees can help you locate the top schools and programs and are a terrific starting point.