SOPHAS and ETS (company that runs the GRE) are now colluding to fleece aspiring public health professionals even more. They now require a separate GRE score report for each school to which a SOPHAS application is sent. $25 each time your SOPHAS application - yes, the same common application (that cannot be changed once it's finalized) - is sent to another program. This fee charged by ETS is in addition to the $120 or $45 that SOPHAS charges for each submission. It is uncanny how the last letter in 'SOPHAS' stands for 'service'. It is a disservice... Much like how CEPH (council for education in public health) accreditation does not correlate to quality pedagogy for public health scholarship; and how CPH (certified in public health "professional credential"), has in reality absolutely zero value. (Consider this: every profession one can name has people working in some way in the field of public health - physicians, allied health specialists, engineers, mathematicians, virologists, lawyers, financiers, teachers, etc., etc., and none of them necessarily needed specialized training in "public health" (as defined by CEPH). Yet, with a CEPH-accredited graduate degree and the CPH credential, one could never expect to be permitted to practice in any of those other fields.) Indeed, rare are instructors in the top tier of public health programs whose own training was had at a school of public health, much less an 'accredited' one.
Although I digress from the topic of SOPHAS, the trend evident in how that "service" operates is inseparable from other visible manifestations of ongoing strategic machinations undertaken to increase growth in the economic industry we know of as academia. Any doubt that public health education is first, a new marketplace created for the industry of academia to grow into, and then secondarily about anything related to scholarship or meaningful learning for population health, should at this point be disabused.
