A am just a bit shy of six figures. Graduated last year, got a job with WMT immediately after graduation.
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P4 in Oklahoma. I'll leave with about $140,000. Just Pharmacy school loans, no undergrad.
I graduated last year with 63k in debt. I currently have 51k left.
To the Pharmacist nearing the end of his career, You and I have a mutual employment history within the profession of pharmacy.
We lived in the best of pharmacy days, Mine started in 1971 with REVCO then I was transitioned to CVS.
Working Supermarket Pharmacy now and I'm 71.
Plan to retire this October.
Pharmacy has changed for the worst, we are the enemy.
We allowed $4 generics to demean the profession and are paying the full price NOW
$150K and I am only a P2!
just graduated, 220k (including living allowance, CO COL is getting out of hand); only 5k from undergrad ):
$66K, almost paid off after working 2.5 years
208k (private school plus undergrad). Class of 2012. About 70k left to go!
I am nearing the end of my career. The profession has been very good to me on the whole. I have worked since just before the very beginning of the computerization of pharmacy. I even know how to ink a Bates stamper. The corporations began to give this profession away to the insurance companies a long while ago. Everybody was afraid to say no to an insurance plan no matter how poor the reimbursement because the pharmacy down the street might accept it and they would lose clients to them. So they took the c-appy plan and hoped to make up the difference selling them greeting cards, soda, and chips while they were in the store buying their pr-scrip-ion. Then they built new pharmacies on every street corner in every city in the country and the body shortage hit and drove up wages. Significantly. Then academia sold us out by "inventing" the PharmD degree and losing a year of graduates just when the demand was at it's highest. They increased class sizes and opened new campuses. Online degrees from for-profit schools became available. New schools opened nationwide. All pumping out more and more and more graduates even as the growth of jobs stagnated. Until finally we started to oversupply the need. When academia was done milking out all the cash they could, the PBM's drove down reimbursement even further to the point that nobody could even make a profit in the business anymore. After all, high wages and low margins is not a sustainable business plan. Corporations responded by adding immunizations, MTM, clinical services, etc so we could use our degree and "serve the needs of the community". Which was really a good thing until the corporate quotas hit and you were expected to meet unreasonable metrics quotas in immunizations, and improve your star rating by doing that CMR however you had to get it done (wink, wink). But be sure to get your script count up, cut your tech hours, get your own flu shot clinics and staff them somehow, maintain your OTC area, promote your business on your own hours, watch your performance in the on-time metrics, explain your P&L to some clone in a suit from the home office, take those conference calls on your day off, organize community outreach seminars, and offer to test each patient's blood pressure and screen their cholesterol. And, by the way, why did that lady say she waited so long just to pick up a simple pr-scrip-ion for a Zpak? Don't you just need to slap a label on a box for that one? This profession is done. I feel so, so bad for those who just invested a lot of money and 6 years of their youth to get a degree in a profession that truly no longer qualifies as such. At least in the retail setting. I wish everybody luck and hope that the future is far brighter than it currently appears. However, our associations don't seem to care, and the corporations and academic profiteers certainly don't either. Nor have I seen a cry from the public nor from any legislator.
I'll leave it at that. Good luck to all.
80K, Class of 2012
$120K, just graduated
140K, graduated in 2017. Nevada.
This is honestly getting ridiculous. At this pace next year we’ll be at $200K and that’s outrageous. Even if you assume a healthy $75/hr it’s going to take you 40 years to repay that – but $75/hr will not happen (you are likely looking at 40 or 50 bucks per hr for long time) – they will continue to push the wages down, they will further relax the criteria, more automation, more AI and Machine Learning, automation, import degrees & labor, etc. Bots for customer care, machines for dispensing. Video conference calls for consultations.
Large corporations are destroying our profession and the kids graduating this decade will get screwed the most. I am at the end of my career, so they can hardly screw me more than they already have, but I feel for the Millennials and Gen Z folks, it’s getting very ugly out there.
According to the American Association of Colleges of Pharmacy's 2017 Graduating Student National Summary Report, the average student loan debt for PharmD graduates amounted to $163,496 in 2017, a 9.5% increase from 2015