"Non-factual assumptions". So says the guy who asked me what I would do if my hypothetical spouse can't find a job in Detroit. I probably was a little terse in my reply, and I certainly didn't mean to offend; my apologies if I did. It wasn't aimed at you specifically, it was moreso an across the board statement because it's irritating to see these posts, and it has become quite a dead horse (referring to me as a lemming and implying I have no common sense did kinda piss me off though).
Here are some facts for everyone who wants to keep waving "saturation" and "surplus" in my face. Buffalo isn't saturated. Western New York, as a whole, is still a very underserved area. Telling me that LA and Chicago have too many pharmacists is all well and good, and I don't doubt that fact, but it's painfully irrelevant in my case. I'm not living in either area, I'm living in a region that's only had one pharmacy school up until a few years ago. Now it has two, and most of the people going to SJF aren't from Buffalo anyway. D'Youville is opening, but I will already have graduated by the time they pump out their first batch of pharmacists. It's not an area many people want to move to, so you don't have people from other schools moving here. Bottom line is, I'll have a job, and if there's a little more competition to get the job, then so be it. It's also a cheap area to live in, so if I'm only making 70,000 a year, that's not such a problem. I can find plenty of places where rent only costs me about $300/month; if I have to live like a pauper for a few years in order to take a big chomp out of my student loans, then so be it. I'm not very materialistic, I'll manage.
I said a long time ago on the forum that I believe this issue will be self-correcting. All it will take is major saturation to occur in a few key areas, and suddenly pharmacy school will stop attracting everyone in sight. Once that happens, many schools in the saturated areas will likely either shut down or severely reduce their class size, depending on whether they opened in response to a legitimate regional need or just saw dollar signs and said "me, too!" This isn't the end of the world, and while I understand your passion towards the subject, it's really a situation where I'd rather worry about my own interests. Let me get myself into a good career situation where it behooves my employer to keep me around, and let the pharmacy situation sort itself out naturally.
I fail to see how SJF creating a JD program makes them a diploma mill. Rochester is wildly underserved in pretty much everything, and the city is starting to become a smaller-scale version of Buffalo (shrinking economy, people moving, etc). It's common knowledge that there's too many JD's these days, but Rochester doesn't have a surplus of anything other than snow.
