Take Action
ASPPH members and partners play a vital role in protecting public health degrees. This page offers steps and resources to engage policymakers and support public health education.
How ASPPH Members, Partners, and Students Can Take Action
ASPPH members and partners can help protect public health degrees by:
Engaging Policymakers
- Work with your university’s Government Relations team to contact your institution’s US Representatives and Senators and raise concerns about the proposal.
- Use ASPPH’s talking points and congressional “asks” to support these conversations and emphasize the real-world impacts on students and communities.
Elevating the Impact on Students and Communities
- Share the “Public Health is a Professional Degree” graphic and the social media toolkit to help spread this important message, highlighting that excluding public health degrees as professional degrees would:
- Raise financial barriers for students;
- Limit program accessibility; and
- Exacerbate workforce shortages, especially in rural and underserved communities.
- Prioritize outreach to members on:
- Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee (HELP)
- House Education & the Workforce Committee
- House and Senate Appropriations Committees
Sharing Data and Stories
- Collect institution-level evidence, including:
- Student debt levels and projected loan-limit shortfalls;
- Enrollment and recruitment vulnerabilities;
- Workforce placement and pipeline impacts.
- Share this information with your congressional offices and, for ASPPH members, with ASPPH staff so we can amplify this data in national advocacy.
Preparing Comments and Legal Communications Strategies
- Use ASPPH’s comment letter as a reference to submit your own institutional comments by March 2, 2026.
Raising Visibility Through Communications
- Use ASPPH’s op-ed template, student op-ed template, and other communications tools to publish stories about:
- The importance of recognizing public health degrees as professional degrees;
- Student, faculty, and community perspectives on the consequences of the proposed definition.
- Share published pieces and powerful stories with ASPPH and via ASPPH’s public health story submission form so they can be amplified broadly.