Finding The Right Prescription

In stiff competition with the private sector for pharmacy faculty, academia often finds itself on the losing side

By Tracie Powell

An aging population, the changing role of pharmacists as health systems rely more heavily on newer, sophisticated drug therapies to cure ills, and a proliferation of corner drug stores is driving a growing demand for pharmacists in this country, a challenge the higher education sector is having a tough time meeting.
There are more students applying to pharmacy schools than available slots; but even as a record number of pharmacy schools are being built, deans are having problems finding people to teach in them. Academia is in stiff competition with the private sector, but often lands on the losing side, as schools can't compete when it comes to compensation.
Three years ago there were four students trying to enroll for every one seat at the College of Pharmacy at the University of Houston. Now, there are nine students for every one seat in a class, according to the school's dean, Dr. Sunny E. Ohia.
"We're not having problems attracting students into the colleges, if anything we have problems keeping them away," Ohia says. "The shortage is largely due to the fact that with the aging generation, we have a lot more prescriptions to fill. The number of prescriptions that are to be filled has been doubling since the early to mid-1990s. If you look at it from that perspective, you see that we almost have to double the number of pharmacists each college trains."
An even bigger problem for Ohia, and other pharmacy deans, is filling faculty vacancies, he says. The school currently has nine vacancies it can't seem to fill. Historically Black Xavier University of Louisiana's pharmacy school also has more students interested in getting into its classes than it has seats. But unlike the University of Houston and others, Xavier has no faculty vacancies and competition with the private sector is almost nonexistent.
"That may have to do with Xavier's reputation," says Cathy Jones, the admissions counselor with the pharmacy school. "We graduate the largest number of African American students. Our program is well-known." Twenty-five percent of the nation's African American pharmacists graduate from Xavier. They practice in careers that range from working for billion-dollar corporations to serving in clinics and hospitals in inner-city, rural and underserved communities.
Xavier's premed program is consistently ranked top 10 in the country and its graduates usually have their pick of medical schools. Xavier's pharmacy school is also ranked in the top tier.
Another historically Black university also turns out its share of pharmacists. The Florida A&M University College of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences is now the third largest of all the pharmacy schools in the nation. It has produced over 1,800 pharmacists and 20 percent of the African American pharmacists in the United States, as well as producing over 60 percent of the African American Ph.D. recipients in the pharmaceutical sciences.
While Xavier University graduates work all over the country, Jones says many choose to work in retail drugstores like Walgreen's and CVS because of the higher pay.
However, LeShahn Layton passed up the retail pharmacies for a hospital experience. Layton, among the first students to graduate from Hampton University's then-newly accredited School of Pharmacy in 2002, was being heavily recruited by hospitals, Eckerd Drugs, Wal-Mart and CVS pharmacies. The drug stores offered signing bonuses and high pay, but she turned them down to do a one-year residency at a hospital instead.
Layton settled on Children's Hospital of Atlanta where she now works full-time as a clinical pharmacist, answering drug questions, adjusting dosages and recommending drug therapy for patients. She earns between $70,000 to $80,000 a year. Layton, who always enjoyed studying science, says she first realized she wanted to be a pharmacist after completing a high school mini-internship program at Wal-Mart.
"I've never liked blood or needles, I don't do well with those," Layton says. "But I've always liked health, science and the human body. Becoming a pharmacist was the best way for me to work with the human body without all that gory stuff." She says the job is rewarding in more ways than just the pay. "You have more say in a patient's therapy, you really get to help people and have an impact on their health."