Because healthcare is moving away from fee for service (FFS) and towards value-based payment/purchasing (VBP), clinical knowledge and application will be paramount. Pharmacists will be called on more than before to perform clinical duties to improve outcomes because in VBP, poor outcomes = less reimbursement, and medication-related problems are a huge issue.
Hovewer, the lowering of standards for pharmacy education and increase in the number of pharmacy schools ensures that supply outpaces demand... and therefore more pharmacists than ever will be doing retail, and even then, retail is seeing such a glut of pharmacists that many new pharmacists are lucky to even have a job floating from store to store without having a stable staff position. If you want a job with a lot of clinical functions, you'd better attend an established school of pharmacy vs. these increasingly common no-standards "diploma mills", and really excel as a student (ideally, be near the top of your class, perform as a leader, impress your professors and preceptors). Expect to have to do a residency, in which you'll earn less than 50% of a full-fledged pharmacist's salary for at least another year.
It really depends on what you are trying to get out of becoming a pharmacist. But people should understand that it is not a profitable profession in most cases. 4 years of school and $200k+ in tuition. If you would have otherwise made $40,000/year with a job right out of undergraduate school, 4 years in pharmacy school comes with the opportunity cost of $160,000 in lost earnings, in addition to the $200,000 you're paying. That's about $360,000 which doesn't even include the interest on loans. If you owe $200k+, expect to start off paying $10,000 a year in interest - that will decrease over time as you pay off your principal, but over the lifetime of the loan, it will add up to become a lot. In order to even "break even" financially, it will take most new pharmacists more than 10 years (15-20, likely)....maybe 10 years to pay off the loan and another 5-10 years to make it back.
Honestly, nurses will probably make more than pharmacists for the first 15 years and be able to save quicker while they are young...by the time they are in their late 20s or early 30s, they will have less trouble affording weddings, vacations, and buying a house while most pharmacists are struggling to pay off their debt. So if you decide to do go into pharmacy, you should understand that the path will be very difficult, the competition will be stiff, and the financial payoff will not be high - you'd better have some kind of compelling non-financial payoff to justify a decision to become a pharmacist. Most prospective pharmacy students just don't have the maturity to see beyond the alluring, but deceptive $100k salary. They just do not understand the costs and difficulties of being a pharmacist.
