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Student loans are a major barrier for public health graduates entering government jobs. Local and state health departments only employ around 10% of the graduates who get public health degrees each year; and the salaries in these health departments are among the lowest of any sector for public health graduate employment. While Public Service Loan Forgiveness can help, it takes 10 years to earn and provides no specific incentive to work in government.

Our local, state, Tribal and territorial health departments need to hire 80,000 new people to provide the most basic public health services. Without a loan repayment program, these crucial organizations lack a key recruitment incentive.

More needs to be done to replenish our crucial public health system, including ensuring fair salaries are paid to our public health workforce and that sufficient, permanent funding is established to hire the 80,000 new staff (we estimate it would cost $10 billion every year, permanently, to do so–and the American Rescue Plan provided only $7.4 billion over five years).

But loan repayment needs to happen, now!

Loan repayment for public health graduates has been established federal law since 2006 (the Pandemic and All Hazards Preparedness Act established it) and was also included in the ACA… but it was never funded.

Unlike medical, nursing, dental, social work, mental health counseling, physician assistant and other clinical professionals who have access to the National Health Service Corps loan repayment program, public health graduates have no loan repayment program of their own.

Health departments which need to hire people with the skills and training uniquely provided by a public health degree– such as epidemiologists, health educators, public health policy analysts, public health program managers, and environmental health specialists–have no solid way to attract these graduates. Our public health workforce continues to struggle as a result.

Watch this video to learn more: https://youtu.be/eLwCgqyn1Ao or download the slides here:

How to Lobby your elected official: https://youtu.be/mZ635sqCaVI

Or view the slides here: