HSPH Set to Replace Doctor of Science with Ph.D. Program

The School of Public Health will undergo a significant transition next fall as it welcomes the first group of students admitted to a new Ph.D. program and replaces its five Doctor of Science programs.

After partnering with the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, the five programs at the School of Public Health—Epidemiology, Environmental Health, Global Health and Population, Nutrition, and Social and Behavioral Sciences—will be replaced by a singular Ph.D. in Population Health Sciences. Students will still be associated with the fields of study within the revamped curriculum of the unified Ph.D.

Students already enrolled in Doctor of Science programs will not be grandfathered into the new program and will be the last students to receive the research doctorate in its 144-year history at the University. Both the S.D. and Ph.D. degrees were introduced in 1872, the year Harvard created what was then called the Graduate Department.

Aside from curricular differences, S.D. students and Ph.D. students do not share the same benefits. While students at HSPH do not have guaranteed tuition funding, students under the umbrella of GSAS enjoy that benefit among others. Teaching assistantships at HSPH also generally pay substantially less than a teaching fellow position for GSAS students.

S.D. student Justin M. Feldman said tensions regarding student benefit packages will be “exacerbated” next year, and could potentially create animosity, when Ph.D. students join the same programs as existing S.D. students.

In an effort to achieve equity between the two groups of students, HSPH will offer guaranteed tuition funding beginning next year for all current S.D. students, according to the director of the new Ph.D. program, School of Public Health professor S. V. Subramanian. In past years, S.D. students received full funding for their first two years and then had to find their own assistance or pay out of pocket.

“As far as we know this is unprecedented in the history of the S.D. degree,” Subramanian wrote in an email. He added that HSPH will also cover the facilities fees for all students next year.

This change comes after years of frustration about unequal funding for S.D. students compared to those in other degree programs. Last year, in light of a historic $350 million donation to HSPH, Feldman said students wrote a letter to the dean asking for more financial support.

Subramanian said HSPH has worked over the past few years to narrow the gap between the benefits enjoyed by students pursuing the two different research doctorates.

“We have come very far in the last five years to narrow this gap,” Subramanian said. “We have moved from a situation where many students—especially those who were not on training grants—self-paid almost all of their tuition, to the upcoming academic year in which no student will pay any tuition.”

Members of Harvard’s graduate student unionization effort have also spread the message about the inequities in benefits at the School of Public Health.

I-Min Lee, a professor of medicine who received an S.D. from the School of Public Health and helped review this year’s first batch of applications to the new Ph.D. program, wrote in an email that the funding available for students makes it “extremely attractive.” She added that the more interdisciplinary curriculum will benefit students by providing training in different fields.

“This new Ph.D. program we have would certainly have given me a head start, formally, had it been available when I was a student,” Lee said.

—Staff writer Leah S. Yared can be reached at leah.yared@thecrimson.com. Follow her on Twitter @Leah_Yared.