Reaccreditation process on track for public health programs
When Ela Austin hit the ground running in a newly created leadership role this past fall, one of her first big tasks was to make sure Virginia Tech’s public health graduate and undergraduate degree programs keep accreditation.
That process is now deeply under way with a “very, very strong” preliminary report from the Council on Education for Public Health (CEPH), said Austin, the first associate dean for public health programs at the Virginia-Maryland College of Veterinary Medicine. The goal is to achieve a full seven-year renewal of the public health program’s accreditation by midsummer.
“I knew that Virginia Tech was coming up on its seven-year reaccreditation cycle,” Austin said. “And so when I got here, I started the process of pulling together all the data that is necessary for the report. So we went through and pulled what data existed and figured out ways to retrospectively pull data that had not been collected in real time. We went through a whole process of collecting that data, organizing the data in the way that CEPH requires for presentation, and then writing the self-study report.”
Council representatives also made a site visit to Virginia Tech to examine the public health programs in person.
Austin said there were three CEPH accreditation criteria that were only partially met in the preliminary report, but “we think that those are all things that we can actually provide additional information on and update them on before that report goes to the council.”
Updated information will be provided by April with the full report going to the CEPH council in June for evaluation.
Austin said her previous experience putting together accreditation reports in prior roles, plus being a site visitor herself at other institutions seeking CEPH accreditation, helped ease what can be a cumbersome process. But she mostly gives credit to the team around her.
“I was really pleased that we were able to work together as a team to get all of that information,” Austin said.
The accreditation process focuses primarily on ensuring students receive proper training for real-world practice, Austin said, examining curriculum design, course offerings, and content to verify programs meet competency-based educational standards.
The accreditation body emphasizes active learning and practical skill assessment rather than theoretical knowledge alone. Austin explained that instead of writing essays about negotiation techniques, for instance, students must actually demonstrate those skills in real-life settings.
Accreditors also evaluate how faculty, students and staff engage in public health research and community service, ensuring programs adequately respond to local needs. Accreditors collect feedback from alumni and employers to verify graduates receive training aligned with professional needs.
The findings also will help Austin and other leaders at Virginia Tech plot a path forward for improvement and growth in the graduate and undergraduate public health programs.
“It has helped me to understand where the strengths are and where the areas for improvement are in our concentrations and also in our undergraduate program,” Austin said. “For me, this was really a great opportunity to come in and say, OK, this is what the program has been doing for the last 10 or 15 years. Let's start thinking about moving the program to that next level of public health education.
“And what was exciting is that the faculty themselves, when I came in last year, were saying, ‘OK, this is it. You're here now. You've got a new set of eyes. We want to revise how we're doing things. We're ready to move forward.”
