Colleges in Dire Financial Straits

[mamselle]

But it's a case of preventative knowledge that lies lurking in case there's an error in the chain of diagnosis.

A knowledgeable Rx may be the only person who sees that a client has been given both warfarin and one of the sulfa drugs that, taken together, cause crystals to precipitate in the urine (crystaluria).

If the same person usually fills your Rx's, they may see and question an error like the transcriptionist writing "g" instead of "mg."

They may be the only one who thinks to ask, "Why, when the diagnosis has always been "hypertension," does it suddenly say "hypotension"? And why has a different drug been ordered instead of the usual one?"

Just between, say, an urgent midnight ER admission, a sleepy on-call resident, a rushed attending MD, and a dyslexic RN, you may have 5 points of possible error with little chance for review (although good AM nursing rounds should catch it, too...)

An intelligent, well-educated pharmacist is your next-to-last line of defense against a serious drug-induced complication.

It's not MacDonald's....

M.

[spork]

Colleges need more horses in them. Everyone loves horses. I think that's the only thing keeping that little tiny women's college from shutting down.

And beer gardens. Beer gardens are white hot right now.

Having a pharmacy school is also pretty reliable as an attention grabber.

I predict that "food forests" might be one the next big lures. Everywhere I go, people keep yammering about food forests. I'd much rather put in a microscale wildlife preserve than deal with an effing mess of fruit trees.

Not anymore.  Every dinky faith-based school that was worried about making payroll has opened one.  20 years ago, there were ~ 70 schools of pharmacy.  Now there are ~ 140.  Most are not filling their classes.  The job market is largely saturated, layoffs abound (Wal-Mart is talking about laying off 40% of their senior staff including pharmacists), and student interest has declined significantly. You all should hope they are not just diving deeper into the candidate pool just to fill their roster.  Do you want the person who handles your medications to have graduated from a school with a 30% pass rate on the boards -- which is the reality right now.  What used to be a cash cow for cash strapped schools is rapidly turning into a law school kind of debacle.

I think the same happened with Doctor of Physical Therapy programs in the late 1990s/early 2000s. There are now ~ 220 DPT programs in the USA. They were seen as cash cows and proliferating like crazy. Then health insurance plans  limited the number of covered physical therapy appointments, so demand for physical therapists dropped off, and enrollments crashed. At least that's the impression I've gotten from talking with people familiar with the field.

Anyway, Beloit is sort of in the middle of a triangle between Madison, Milwaukee, and Chicago. Colleges/universities in those cities are not beyond the comfort radius of high schoolers in an area of declining population. And it doesn't have the cachet of a super-elite like Bryn Mawr or Grinnell.

[Juvenal]

This belongs, in "Misread," but it was not a title I saw.  I saw this line:

Having a pharmacy school is also pretty reliable as an attention grabber.

Scrolling down fast, it registered for a moment as "a pregnancy school."  That was another kind of attention grabber.

[mahagonny]

One might wonder why anyone would want to be a pharmacist today.  Anyone can put pills in a bottle and read printouts describing possible side effects of meds, etc.  I get that sometimes there are serious questions to answer, potential drug interactions that the computer didn't flag, etc., but most of the time the job sounds pretty boring and a waste of the pharmacist's skills.

I could have had a pension by now. But it's more responsibility than being a clerk. Don't come to work tired! Two of my colleagues quit adjunct work for pharmacy school.

It would be nice to have a job where you don't have to get someone else to do something so they can get a passing grade. Talk about wasted skill.

[apl68]

This belongs, in "Misread," but it was not a title I saw.  I saw this line:

Having a pharmacy school is also pretty reliable as an attention grabber.

Scrolling down fast, it registered for a moment as "a pregnancy school."  That was another kind of attention grabber.

In this age of declining birthrates I suppose starting a program in obstetrics wouldn't be a good idea either.

[apl68]

One might wonder why anyone would want to be a pharmacist today.  Anyone can put pills in a bottle and read printouts describing possible side effects of meds, etc.  I get that sometimes there are serious questions to answer, potential drug interactions that the computer didn't flag, etc., but most of the time the job sounds pretty boring and a waste of the pharmacist's skills.

And all librarians do is check books in and out and shelve them, and all teachers do is drone on all day in front of class and move papers around, and all masons do is stick bricks together with mud, etc.

It's usually a bad idea to express strong opinions on an occupation one has no way of really knowing anything about.

[secundem_artem]

One might wonder why anyone would want to be a pharmacist today.  Anyone can put pills in a bottle and read printouts describing possible side effects of meds, etc.  I get that sometimes there are serious questions to answer, potential drug interactions that the computer didn't flag, etc., but most of the time the job sounds pretty boring and a waste of the pharmacist's skills.

You are making the assumption that all PharmD's are those poor b@st@rds behind the counter at a Wal-Green's or CVS.  Between meeting the Key Performance Indicators set by their regional managers, the shifting sands of what the insurance companies will pay for this week, and the consumer who thinks that their insurance is really the pharmacist's problem, some of what you say is true.  But that is by no means the entire profession.  And even those poor b@st@rds at Wal-Greens do more than move pills from big bottles into little ones.  Just because you don't see it happening, doesn't mean nothing is going on back there.

[mythbuster]

There is a big difference between being the one pharmacist and being the pharmacy technician. The technicians are the ones that count the pills. There is also a huge difference between being the pharmacist at the local CVS and being a pharmacist at a major medical center. At the hospital, pharmacists are often field specific (oncology, infectious disease etc.) They also have become one of the most important players in infection control and limiting inappropriate use of antibiotics. But as you specialize there are fewer jobs, of course.

[tuxthepenguin]

Most are not filling their classes.  The job market is largely saturated, layoffs abound (Wal-Mart is talking about laying off 40% of their senior staff including pharmacists), and student interest has declined significantly.

There has also been a dramatic change in the structure of the industry. The giants (CVS, Walgreen's, Walmart, etc.) have taken over and put the small guys out of business or in a serious hurt. The pay they offer is pretty bad relative to what you used to make as an independent pharmacist. Or so I've been told by bitter ex-pharmacists.

[picard]

OK people. Let's try going back to what's this forum is about, which is discussing Colleges in Dire Financial Straits.

Here is a follow-up to the story about Marlboro College's planned merger with Emerson. Some perspectives from faculty and students of the college about how does it meant for them and what would its closure would have meant for them as well as for future students interested in a liberal arts education:

https://www.vpr.org/post/really-beautiful-community-marlboro-college-prepares-close-its-doors#stream/0

Amer Latif has taught religious studies at Marlboro College for 16 years. When he first interviewed for a job teaching at the school, Latif said the scene inside the dining hall convinced him that this small liberal arts college in southern Vermont would be a good place to work.

"No matter who you are on this campus — the president, the staff; if you're a janitor, you're a professor, you're a student — we all sit together and eat at the same table," Latif said. "So if you're a religious person, like myself, you might think of it in those terms that this was the ideal that many prophets tried to achieve. And we had a secular version of that here. And of course, that for me is the loss that we will have of a really beautiful community where people are people. We really treat each other as fully beautiful human beings."

Anna Morrissey is a senior at Marlboro College so she doesn't have to worry about where she'll attend school next year. But in the four years she's been here she's watched schools like Marlboro shut down, so she wonders where students like her will end up as the prospects for liberal arts educations fade.

"To see the schools with this model of, like, bringing in students — they're not all valedictorians, they didn't all get the best SAT scores, but they're really driven — and you bring them here and you get out of their way and they like do something amazing. And like, that is the one that has to go?" Morrissey said. "That's the one that for whatever reason isn't sustainable or isn't valued makes no sense to me. And in the worser days of this process that's what feels the most unfair."

[spork]

The article says tenured faculty have jobs at Emerson. Not tenure-track?

[Hibush]

The article says tenured faculty have jobs at Emerson. Not tenure-track?

The original information said tenure track. The tenured Marlboro faculty will have to re-earn tenure at Emerson.

[nonntt]

I'm sorry for prolonging the tangent, but there were several high-profile news articles recently about the ROI of college degrees, and how small pharmacy schools were beating out Harvard and Stanford for the top spots, based on this project:
https://cew.georgetown.edu/cew-reports/collegeroi/

So I appreciate the insight that pharmacy is a bubble about to burst.

Now, back to more dying colleges...

[kaysixteen]

I get that there are still jobs for pharmacists that actually allow them to use those skills, but most of what they obviously do *in plain view of the customer* at places like Wal-Mart is more pr less exactly the same as having an MLS check out or reshelve books.  It is certainly true that pharmacists can and do give specific meds advice to patients when asked, and could be the last line of defense against inadvertent med interactions, but most such cases will be caught be the computer unless the patient is using multiple pharmacies (at which time the pharmacist in the place you're at niw won't have any idea you're taking meds filled elsewhere, to note that potential interaction).

While we're at it, Wal-Mart at least pisses off the regular med customers, and lades up their pharmacists with the inane task of regularly making the patent who's just paid for his prescriptions to have the pharmacist take the bottles out of the bag , read the label, and ask 'any questions', even if it's a reguiar customer who's refilling a prescription that he's filled there as is for years.

[ciao_yall]

I get that there are still jobs for pharmacists that actually allow them to use those skills, but most of what they obviously do *in plain view of the customer* at places like Wal-Mart is more pr less exactly the same as having an MLS check out or reshelve books.  It is certainly true that pharmacists can and do give specific meds advice to patients when asked, and could be the last line of defense against inadvertent med interactions, but most such cases will be caught be the computer unless the patient is using multiple pharmacies (at which time the pharmacist in the place you're at niw won't have any idea you're taking meds filled elsewhere, to note that potential interaction).

While we're at it, Wal-Mart at least pisses off the regular med customers, and lades up their pharmacists with the inane task of regularly making the patent who's just paid for his prescriptions to have the pharmacist take the bottles out of the bag , read the label, and ask 'any questions', even if it's a reguiar customer who's refilling a prescription that he's filled there as is for years.

That's actually a good idea. You never know if a patient might be developing side effects. Or suddenly trying herbal remedies not realizing they might interfere with the meds. Or take another prescription that is being filled elsewhere "because it's cheaper at CVS."

If their doctor just rushes in and out with an impatient, foot-tapping "any questions?' they might not know who else they could ask.

.