Why Should You Study Urban Public Health at Hunter College?

Hunter has a long tradition of academic excellence in both faculty and student achievement.   And, New York City offers an exciting urban environment for exploring and addressing inequality in health.  Within the city, Hunter College offers one of the best educational bargains around. 

Today, those who study urban public health are engaged in both understanding and trying to promote health.  Urban areas, such as New York City, present unique challenges and opportunities when it comes to health.  And, as we increasingly live in a global village in which large urban areas are connected by frequent travel, threats to public health are vastly more complex.

Our mission

Urban Public Health is committed to educating public health professionals who can promote health and prevent disease among diverse urban populations.  We are devoted to developing public health personnel that employers in the New York metropolitan region and beyond are looking to hire to help maintain a healthy population.  We are also working to contribute new knowledge to solving the health problems faced by urban populations, as well as applying existing knowledge to these issues.

What is public health?

The goal of public health is to assure, maintain, protect, promote and improve the health of large populations.  Or, as a report from the Institute of Medicine puts it, public health is “what we as a society do collectively to assure the conditions in which people can be healthy” (Institute of Medicine, 1988).  A common misunderstanding is that public health is primarily about individual health, or individual access to health care.  In fact, individual health and access to health care are only a small part of what public health is interested in. Promoting population health involves a number of interrelated areas.

 Why focus on cities?

Increasingly, more people in the world live in cities than in rural areas.  And, many of the world's health problems  begin in cities and move to other areas (e.g., HIV, substance use, violence, air and water pollution).  As an urban public university with a public mission, Hunter College is ideally suited to meet the challenges of public health focused on urban areas.   Finally, our students find that there are ample job opportunities in New York City and the surrounding metropolitan areas.