Residency is not a solution if your friendly walgreens can open hundreds/thousands of residency position. Instead of paying a rph 120 k a year, walgreens can pay 40 k for a resident and have he/she work 60 hours a week.
Who would accredit these Walgreens residencies? I think when people talk about a residency requirement, they are talking about accredited residencies.
This is good news, there has been grassroots complaining about new colleges and garbage distance/internet programs being detrimental to our degree (investment) for a long time, but now that apha and ashp are acknowledging the problem the ship may be righted. correct?
The problem is that APhA and ASHP don't have the ability to DO anything about it. I agree that acknowledging the problem is a good first step, but it will take much more than that to effect any change.
They lament the fact that many new schools are opened by for-profit institutions in the same state/cities as other non-profit schools.
This is not what they said (see page 5 of the document). The vast majority of new schools have been opened by private, non-profit schools. The issue remains the same (multiple schools in one city, no clear need for a new program) but it's NOT a "for profit" issue.
As far as I know, there are only two pharmacy school at "for profit" institutions. One is already accredited and has been around for a number of years (in other words, it's NOT a new school) and the other has candidate status and was established in a city without a pharmacy school and was only the 2nd school in that state. There may be others, but they clearly aren't the majority. I doubt they are even a substantial minority.
While I think that the rapid expansion of pharmacy schools is mostly about GREED and the need for colleges and universities to come up with new sources of revenue, it's unfair and inaccurate to lay the problem at the feet of "for profit" institutions. Non-profit schools make just as much money off of pharmacy students and are in fact the biggest contributer to the "new schools" problem.
People decry the "new schools" but the paper also makes it clear that existing schools are not innocent. Also from page 5(emphasis added):
According to the Accreditation Council for Pharmacy Education (ACPE), from 2005-08 a 36.5% increase in student enrollment was expected. Expansion at existing schools accounted for 84% of this enrollment growth.
Expansion of existing programs includes public institutions expanding their class size and the proliferation of branch campuses of existing public schools. Public schools make money from pharmacy students as well. The public COP I attended now costs about 10K per semester for 9 semesters. That's a pretty penny and doesn't include the tax revenue per student provided by the state. State institutions are subsized by government (to a degree) but still charge tuition that's on par with some private schools. They are making money too, no doubt about it.
The problem of too many seats at pharmacy schools and not enough jobs is not a "for profit" school problem. It's not a private school problem. It's not a public school problem. Schools of ALL types are to blame for seeing the potential for $$$ while ignoring the changing job market. It's a mess, and you can't single out any particular institution or type of institution to blame. That's why finding a solution is so difficult.
