U. graduate degree in population aging shifts online

Starting in the Fall 2024 semester, the School of Public Health will offer its Master of Public Health Population Aging degree entirely online, according to a press release.

The degree is currently offered in person through the School of Public Health. The program's transition to an online classroom aims to make it more accessible, said Elissa Kozlov, a professor at the School of Public Health and the director of the Population Aging program.

"We created this option to acknowledge that there might be people across the country who really want this extra training and extra expertise who are already in the workforce or who have family obligations or just straight up don't want to move to New Jersey," Kozlov said.

The program, which is the only online Public Aging degree in the country, will help prepare health care workers to deal with older populations, she said.

"A lot of folks we anticipate are already working with older adults in some capacity," Kozlov said. "We anticipate maybe some nurses, social workers or community health workers might already be working with older adults but really lack that theory and conceptual framework and statistics skills to have a broader impact."

Aging is not a popular healthcare field, with many medical students pursuing other tracks, Kozlov said. The U.S. has approximately 7,000 geriatricians, doctors who specialize in caring for older people, with half of them currently practicing, according to an article from The New York Times.

"(Population Aging professions are) not as sexy as some of the other fields," Kozlov said. "I think that careers in aging have not gotten the attention and excitement that they deserve. It's an underserved and under-resourced area."

She said many different fields of work interact with older populations, and many can benefit from obtaining this degree.

The online program will contain the same courses as the current degree track. This includes core classes, practical experiences and a capstone project, she said. Some of the degree-specific courses include Mental Health and Aging, Introduction to Gerontology and a class that discusses the long-term impacts of childhood adversity.

Currently, the concentration only has a few students, as the University just started offering the degree two years ago, Kozlov said. The program offers multiple scholarships to students who display excellence in the field. Kozlov said she hopes that financial aid can incentivize students to consider pursuing Population Aging.

Kozlov said that Rutgers is already making great strides in population aging research and education and that this degree is more focused on what it can do for the aging population rather than its notoriety at Rutgers.

"We all hope to get old. That's a goal of life," Kozlov said. "And yet our country sometimes views aging as pathology and older adults as invisible, but we're all headed there. That's the goal. That's where we want to be. So we work really hard to make sure that every adult in America ages with dignity and ages without suffering."