public health personnel. These short courses were recognized as emergency measures until the schools were able to develop more adequate graduate educational programs. Perhaps not surprisingly, the faculty of the founding schools of public health generally disapproved of this rush to short training courses. At Harvard, when the Social Security Act was passed in 1935, the faculty immediately understood that there would be a demand for short courses and decided to resist. They unanimously stated that “short courses should not be instituted or standards lowered, no matter what the situations we are asked to meet.”¹⁷ To emphasize their concern about maintaining high academic standards, the faculty promptly raised admission standards.¹⁸

The tremendous push in the late 1930s toward training larger numbers of public health practitioners was also a push toward practical training programs rather than research. Public health departments wanted personnel with one year of public health education: typically, the M.P.H. generalist degree. If they could not attract public health practitioners with this credential, they settled for a person with a few months of public health training. Ideally, they also wanted people who understood practical public health issues rather than scientific specialists with research degrees. Thus, public health education in the 1930s tended to be practically oriented, with considerable emphasis on fields such as public health administration, health education, public health nursing, vital statistics, venereal disease control, and community health services. In this period, too, many schools developed field training programs in local communities where their students could get a taste of the practical world of public health and a preparation for their roles within local health departments. The 1930s were thus the prime years of community-based public health education.

In 1939, the Rockefeller Foundation decided to evaluate the status and future of public health education. The Scientific Directors of the International Health Division selected Thomas Parran, the Surgeon General, and Livingston Farrand, recently retired President of Cornell University, to study the schools of public health in the United States and Canada.¹⁹ Parran and Farrand estimated that about 300 public health physicians and between 2,000 and 4,000 public health nurses would be needed each year to staff public health departments. They also noted an increasing demand for sanitary engineers, epidemiologists, statisticians, and other types of