Washington University will offer a dual master’s degree in business administration and public health starting in the fall of 2011.

The graduate degree will combine classes and faculty from both the Olin Business School and the George Warren Brown School of Social Work.

This program comes at a time when effective administration of health care at the national level continues to be of unprecedented importance in the United States.

Joseph Fox, the associate dean and director of MBA programs at the Olin Business School, is one of the driving forces behind the creation of the program.

Discussion for this dual degree started at the beginning of last year, when the Master of Public Health (MPH) degree was first offered through the school of social work.

“The minute that we heard that there was going to be an MPH program, we thought that once they get established, we’ll want to talk to them about a dual-degree program,” Fox said.

The degree will contain a total of 87 credit hours from both the business and social work schools at the University and will take two and a half or three years to complete. According to Fox, these credit hours will be include classes that are currently a part of either the MBA or MPH programs, but he added that interdisciplinary courses unique to the dual degree could be a part of the program in the future.

Students currently enrolled in the MBA or MPH programs here, especially students in their first year in one of those programs, can apply to enter into the program next year. Individuals can also apply to enter straight into the dual-degree program next year. Fox predicts that in the future, applicants for the dual degree will primarily be first-year MBA or MPH graduate students here.

Dual programs that combine an MBA with another master’s degree aren’t uncommon, but not many graduate schools in the United States currently offer the MBA/MPH combination.

“[Washington University] will be at the front end of this one,” Fox said. “In this day and age, any way to link the further study of public health with business is always a pretty fertile ground.”

According to Fox, health care spending accounts for 17 percent of the U.S. gross national product, meaning one-sixth of all spending in the country occurs in the health sector.

In addition, the Bureau of Labor Statistics says that the health care industry will add three million new jobs this decade. This figure includes health practitioners such as doctors and nurses, but it also suggests that health care administrators are in increasingly high demand.

“The growth in job opportunities in the future is [very] much tilted to health care and health care-related fields,” Fox said.

The dual degree could also interest students who do not want to work directly in health care. Fox suggests that this degree would also serve to better prepare students entering the health business sector, such as those who may be interested in working at a health insurance corporation.

Vaidehi Ambai, a junior majoring in anthropology and possibly minoring in health care management, sees this dual degree as a great opportunity for those who may be interested in entering health-related field.

“I plan to go into health care administration or health care policy, so I think it will give me a very good range of perspectives on any situation that comes up in that sort of setting,” Ambai said.

Ambai feels that the interdisciplinary nature of the program is part of what makes it so appealing since it has been announced.

“The fact that you can get an MBA and be in the Brown School and get a master’s in public health is a very interdisciplinary focus that I’m attracted to and that I think other students would be attracted to as well,” Ambai said.