Are there more pharmacy graduates than jobs?
This is the question that may be lingering on your mind as a current pharmacy student or as a student wanting to pursue pharmacy in the future. Well I did some research and thought it would be interesting to share what I found.
According to the United States Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor statistics, there was an estimated 247,100 pharmacy jobs for pharmacists in 2014. It was predicted that there would be a slow increase of new jobs by just 3%. Hence by 2024 the government predicted there would only be an additional 9,100 jobs.
I will give you a moment to let that sink in. Yes in just 10 years there will be an increase of 9,100 jobs.
Now to further understand the impact of this lets examine how many colleges of pharmacy there are and approximately how many students are graduating each year.
According to the American Association of Colleges of Pharmacy (AACP) as of July 2017 there are now currently 142 U.S- based colleges of pharmacy with 4 schools being in pre-candidate status. What is interesting is that of the total 142 pharmacy schools, 51.4% are private based and 48.6% are public. I will leave it up to you how you want to interpret these numbers, but it is interesting how a majority of pharmacy schools are private. AACP discovered that in the 2015-16 year, 14,556 professional pharmacy degrees were awarded. Now imagine the numbers only increase each year.
So if we are having at least 14,000 new graduates each year and there is only an expected increase of 9,100 jobs by 2024 that is a very scary prospect. It could be interpreted that in fact we may have more pharmacy graduates each year than new jobs.
Now these are just estimates and many things could change in the future, however it does not change the fact that we have a bit of a problem on our hands. The question is how to solve it.
For more information on pharmacy job and school statistics please visit the following sites below:
- http://www.aacp.org/about/Pages/Vitalstats.aspx
- https://www.bls.gov/ooh/healthcare/pharmacists.htm
- https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes291051.htm#nat
–Ms Rx Geek
Kgrant