A Hot Trend on Campus: Majoring in Health Care - New York Times

A Hot Trend on Campus: Majoring in Health Care - New York Times: "A Hot Trend on Campus: Majoring in Health Care

By ALAN FINDER
Published: February 5, 2006
Eighteen months after the University of Colorado created a department to prepare undergraduates for a broad range of careers in health care, from medicine to physical therapy to physician assistant, that department already has 1,200 students, making it the second most popular on campus.
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Seth Wenig for The New York Times
Vanessa Fernandez, a graduate of Stony Brook University's health science program, now sees many alternatives to applying for medical school. A similar program at Stony Brook University, on Long Island, has grown to 370 graduating students last year from 35 four years ago. And at Marquette University, which in 1997 became among the first to offer a basic science degree in human health, the course of study has become more popular than any other.
'It's the fastest-growing major that this campus has ever seen,' said William E. Cullinan, associate chairman of the department of biomedical sciences at Marquette, in Milwaukee. 'It just exploded beyond anyone's imagination.'
Flagship state universities, and private institutions other than the elite, have long drawn large numbers of working- and middle-class students with a pragmatic bent. But university officials say the current generation is particularly attuned to selecting majors with strong career possibilities.
Add to that the plentiful supply of jobs in the growing health care industry, and a result is that health science programs have been taking off more "