Yes, a lifetime is a long time. A women who goes back to work at 35 or 40 can still fit in a sum total or 30 work years (ex: 5 years before kids, 25 after). Is there any reason pharmacists cannot return to the field after a gap of, say, 3-10 years? The OP uses the phrase “full career” in question 2, but generally a full career can still contain a gap, like threemae said.
1.) So is a person who gets a professional degree (particularly from a state school) in an underserved profession morally obligated to use it?
*I think that it would be a good idea if we were able to implement granting financial aid in these areas in return for a mandatory service for X number of years in the field. (5 sounds like a reasonable number of years.) If they can’t live up to it, there are always penalty options. Also, there are other countries that do handle tuition issues in a similar manner. (Foreign students in almost any country are charged more because the school can. I’m okay with this.)
2.) Is it wrong to take a spot in a professional school if you don’t intend to make a full career out of it?
I think it’s wrong to take a spot in a professional school if you don’t intend to make a career out of it at all. Going through all of that and then going for the MRS aspect of a degree like that is wasteful, and if it’s something that they were planning on all along, despicable. One can find a man to marry outside of graduate school, and even outside of undergraduate schooling. I’m especially annoyed by the notion of women with advanced degrees that haven’t made use of them at all because it reflects badly on me as a female. I’m not likely to drop out of the work force to be a SAHM, but because I’m a young female and in a serious relationship, I am regarded with as much scrutiny as a woman whose only goal is to be on the job long enough to have benefits and maternity leave so she can have babies and leave the job permanently.
3.) Should the schools try to keep such people out?
*How would they regulate that without barring most [if not all] women from the programs? For now, I’d say no, with the exception of someone who is blatant about their intention of getting the degree and then not actually using it to work in the field, if even for only a few years. *
4.) And a more interesting debate, perhaps: let’s say that we did a study and we found that between maternity leave, reduced hours for child care, and those who quit entirely, the average female pharmacy school graduate works half as many hours as a pharmacist over her lifetime as the average male graduate. Is that a reason to favor men in the admissions process?
*I wouldn’t say so. One of the major reasons why many women work fewer hours is because the obligation to care for children is on the mother in more cases than not. An unhelpful husband or no husband at all doesn’t give the female employee too many options if the childcare provider only provides care during hours that require the woman to leave work early or come in late. It doesn’t excuse the fact that being consistently late and leaving early should not be rewarded with the same pay, respect, or job security as someone who is able to keep to the schedule they agreed to when they were hired. Also, with a reasonable portion of these women, they are working part time in order to be able to handle both their households and a job without major problems with their employer.
And, finally, 5.) can this phenomenon be blamed for the shortfall in these high-demand professions?
*I’d say that it’s more complicated than a lot of women just not staying with the job in the long run in favor of motherhood. A lot of these institutions only have so much room, so many instructors, and so much funding. This means fewer seats. Some areas have a higher need than what the schools can compensate for, so it’s a bit of a catch-22 in those areas. Now, let’s assume that this is exacerbated by people moving out of the areas most in need of professionals in their field. This makes the phenomenon even more noticeable. I honestly don’t think that there are enough women not staying in the field to make as significant a dent in the local field as it appears from the OP.
No. In fact, as I guess I didn’t make clear in my original post, I don’t believe it’s anywhere near as significant as it’s made out to be. I’m mostly thinking out loud here.
Tuition at a state school does not pay the full cost of one’s education there. That’s why they’re “state schools”–the state funds them. It would be impossible to calculate how much the state has spent on a particular student’s education, but it’s fair to say that it has invested something.
Eyer8: No, I don’t have a cite, but I have been told repeatedly by people in a position to know that there is a shortage of pharmacists in Kentucky. Also, they’re trying to open a pharmacy school at the University of the Cumberlands, which would be hard to imagine if a significant number of spots elsewhere were going unfilled.
That last post was from me, BTW.
I decided to call one of my Pharm-D friends tonight and ask their opinion on the topic of why there is a shortage in the pharmaceutical fields. I am presenting it without comment.
The pay for a pharmacist with a couple of years of experience is pretty good, typically around 70-80 k/year. Well worth the effort for the degree. The shortage comes from two sources (in my friends opinion):
- The job is too boring for words. Because there are so many laws and regulations around drug sales, most pharmacists are just bottle fillers. They count out pills into bottles, call insurance companies, and basically perform the functions of a clerk. While the pay is good, it is no better and sometimes worse than a job in marketing, technical writing, sales, etc… Why stay when a more exciting and fulfilling job is easily had with similar pay and benefits.
This is not always true. Being a pharmacist in a hospital environment is quite different. In a hospital, a pharmacist has to use their education. Calculate dosages, take into account a patient’s status, watch out for drug-drug interactions, etc… These types of jobs are in high demand and are difficult to get.
- In the past, there were pharmacies in Walgreen’s (or equivalent) and that was about it. Now there are pharmacies in every grocery store, big box store (Wal-Mart …), drug store, etc… The training of pharmacists has not kept up with this multiplication of pharmacies.
Her answers to the questions:
- No. 2) No. 3) No. 4) Hell No. 5) Don’t think so.
She thinks the laws need to be changed. Most pharmaceutical positions could be handled by a robot and a good computer database. Requiring trained pharmacists to count out pills into bottles is a colossal waste of time and money.
Well, if that’s what you meant… this is silly. The logical extension of your statement is that anyone who has ever gone to a state university who is not currently in a career related to their degree somehow “wasted” that state’s money. Do you really want to go down that path?
My first bachelor’s degree, on paper, has nothing to do with my current career. Yet the skills I acquired in the process of getting that degree serve me very well nearly every day. It so happens that I went to a private school for that degree and paid my own way, but if I hadn’t… who’s to say that my first degree was a waste? I sure don’t.
I don’t think that anyone is trying to buttonhole anyone into a particular career path. I’m just saying that you should use your degree in some manner.
If that degree serves you in every day of your life, then it’s absolutely worth it. Similarly, if an MD uses their degree and experiences to write books that expand humanism and a respect for others, then I don’t think that degree is wasted either. But to become a stay at home mom for twenty years? That’s not the most efficient utilization of that publicly-funded MD degree, and it’s too a point where I think society has got a say in the matter.
Similarly, some of the pre-med’s that I have run across in these woods have expressed an intention to become plastic surgeons, “because they make, OMG, like $500 K a year and you can retire at like 37 and bone Tahitian whores and drive a Mercedes SLK all day after that!” and I don’t think that they’re an appropriate choice for admissions to a public med-school either.
Agreed, this is something that I find amazing. In most countries, when you get a prescription the pharmacist gives you the whole original package, which includes a document with the same information that can be found in the vademecum. Recommended dosages, possible secondary effects, possible interactions… In the US, patients get very little information, yet a pharmacist is required to transfer things from the bottle the pharmaceutical company made into a little orange plastic flask.
In Spain a pharmacy is a stand-alone store. It must be owned by a pharmacist, but most of the clerks aren’t pharmacists; when the pharmacy is “on emergency duty” there must be a pharmacist there, but not every minute the store is open. You don’t need to be one to take a package of “what the paper says, in the kind of packaging and concentration the package says” and run the paperwork.
If you ask a non-degreed clerk to recommend an OTC medication, they’ll tell you they can’t; if the pharmacist is inside they’ll call him and if not you have to wait till he comes back or go to another pharmacy. Again, things that are not classified as medication, like cosmetics, they can recommend.
Okay, I can say what I did because my first degree was in the liberal arts. But what if I had gotten a degree in accounting, or some other field that involves field-specific training I didn’t use everyday, or just made me a more informed person about that particular field with benefits accruing only to me? What then?
And who is to judge whether I’m making a worthy use of my degree or not?
I think you are the only person in this thread who has focused on women “retiring at 30” or leaving the workforce for half their potential working years as being so large a problem that “society has got to [have] a say in the matter.” Do you have a cite for that behavior really being such a serious problem?
Personally, I wouldn’t be enthused about being treated by such a person. However, as someone upthread pointed out, someone with that perspective who is also bright enough to make it through med school has no incentive to be honest if it meant they couldn’t get what they wanted (admission to med school). So how do you plan to screen these folks out, short of reading their minds?
I can’t think of a more effective way of making enrolment rates plummet than giving the impression to a potential student, that, once graduated, they are slaves to the nation. Who would enrol on a programme that boxed them into a career, even if they found that they hated it? Not me.
OK. Give us some figures on MD’s who give up their jobs to become stay at home moms for twenty years. Just how many do this?
I know several female MD’s. They are able to afford very good child care as they continue their careers.
Who is this?
He was educated at Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, A.B. (summa cum laude) 1964 (Phi Beta Kappa). He went on to become the Henry Russell Shaw Travelling Fellow, 1964-65 and Visiting Lecturer in Anthropology at Cambridge University, England, 1965. He graduated at Harvard Medical School, gaining an M.D. in 1969 and did post-doctoral fellowship study at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, La Jolla, California, in 1969–1970. In 1988, he was Visiting Writer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. While in medical school, he wrote novels under the pen names John Lange and Jeffery Hudson.
Why–Michael Crichton. Who never practiced medicine a day in his life. Does his body of work fit your criteria.
I’m a little wary of others deciding what is and is not a good use of one’s degree, but on the other hand, degree applications generally have a “career goals” question, and if someone were to write “I plan to work 5 years and then never have anything to do with healthcare again”, then I would say that an admissions board could turn them down quite fairly. The thing is, it gets a little dicey when a candidate is considered less desireable because they check the “Female” box next to gender, or has a different last name than on their high school transcripts. I believe that in the U.S at least, we don’t let the interests of society justify this sort of statistical speculation, in the absense of facts. That is, we frown on pulling a guy over because he’s black, but if he’s speeding than thats different. Of course, you could argue that unlike driving, admission to state school is not a right, and I would agree with that. On the other had, is a shortage of pharmacists (or doctors or whatever) so great that it is a threat to society and justifies this sort of speculation?
Further, the idea that women are enrolling in pharmacy school to kill a few years, well, its seems hard to believe. People don’t generally go to grad school for kicks, at least not any grad school I’ve been in. Even if they don’t stay in the field (ie, law school), they usually have some career-related goal. So is pharmacy school just really cheap and easy?
My sister-in-law is one of these women. She has a master’s degree in engineering. She worked for a car company for a few years then when she and her husband decided it was time to have kids, she left her job to be a SAHM.
At first, I was a little critical of her decision myself. “What, you put your parents through the expense of college just to use your degree for two or three years?” But then I realized that she’d actually made a very smart decision. What if something happens to my brother-in-law? Many SAHMs don’t have degrees or work experience which would allow them to quickly find a job that would support them and their children if they lost their husbands. They end up struggling to make ends meet. Sure, engineering jobs aren’t exactly dripping from the trees, but with her degree, she’s got a marketable asset that many women don’t.
That was my thought as well.
I have no such citation or source and I have never claimed that women are at the base of this problem. I’ve simply spoken to whether or not we should select MD applicants, in part, based upon their likely overall years working in some capacity using their MD degree. In my own informal opinion of the situation, it’s early retirement that’s proving far more damaging to the physician workforce; I’ve met tons that are just plotting out how to retire at 50.
Now, perhaps this isn’t those MD’s “fault,” a lot of them I suppose have some fairly valid complaints about the practice of medicine, and perhaps our healthcare system should do better to increase retention of older physicians, or simply show more flexibility so that these older MD’s have options in between 100 hour weeks and complete retirement.
But, on balance, if I was an MD admissions officerand I had to choose between two otherwise equal candidates, one of whom wanted to retire early and one whol planned to never retire, I would choose the applicant that never intended to retire.
Will the clever applicants just start changing their interview answers to reflect what the MD admissions folks want to hear? Perhaps. But then I suppose one should argue that interviewing and essays should be removed from the MD admissions process entirely because the good applicants will just change their answers to whatever will get them into med-school.
However, assuming that interviews and essays have any value at all in MD admissions (and some would argue they don’t), then why not use it to address how long that physician is likely to work?
Another advantage I’d point to in the use of interviews and essays in the MD application process is that it isn’t a one way street of programs picking applicants, it also becomes a process of self selection. When you start out as an undergrad (I know, I live with freshmen) a full 30% of the class, “wants to be a doctor.” Fortunately, the MD admissions process forces people to do a fair amount of introspection and by senior year only a small portion of the class is applying to MD programs. If MD programs start identifying overall utility to society in the position as a criteria for admissions, some (not all) of the people that would have otherwise applied for MD programs might choose to pursue something else.
A few years back, I considered going back to school to go into pharmacy. I have a great chemistry background, am fascinated by the work, am good with people, am willing to work weird hours, etc. And I knew there was a shortage of pharmacists.
But when I took a look at the pay for pharmacists, at least in this area, it was low.
And then I found that I would be starting from scratch, so 5 years (I think it was) and then a year or two interning (if I remember correctly) in order to get a job starting at $25,000 (starting late-night pharmacist at a local CVS).
I simply couldn’t afford to do it. I was 30 or 31 and there was simply no way.
So, my first inclination is that it’s a duration of education that many people can’t afford considering the pay. It’s a wonder there aren’t bigger shortages.
This thread started out being specifically about the allegation that women who pursue a professional degree with gov’t financial aid, and who then leave their jobs to raise their children, are the cause of a pharmacist shortage and/or take up seats in a program that would better go to men. Since you said earlier that:
post #6 - “I don’t see the justification for admitting someone that intends to retire at 30 to have kids when there are plenty of qualified females that are willing to put in a solid 40 years are available.”
post #27 - “But to become a stay at home mom for twenty years? That’s not the most efficient utilization of that publicly-funded MD degree, and it’s too a point where I think society has got a say in the matter.”
you’ll forgive me for thinking you were talking more about women than men in the context of this discussion. But in looking over your posts I see that you have actually addressed some broader situations as well, so mea culpa.
Lots of people aspire to retire at 50, or at least some time before the usual retirement age. It’s supposed to be a mark of success. If someone achieves that, what’s it to you if they retire early? I’m honestly perplexed why you think you, the gov’t or anyone else should have a say in how people live out their professional lives.
Are you serious? In the schools I attended, and in talking to my friends who were going through pre-med programs, people didn’t drop out because they reconsidered their life goals. They dropped out because the course work was too damn difficult for them to keep up, or they realized that their lives were going to be so totally consumed by extended education that they wanted out before losing any more time from their young adult lives.
With respect to the pharmacy field, which was the subject of the OP, it seems that poor starting pay and less years of earning a living wage are major factors contributing to a shortage of people in the field, so this is rather different from a med school situation. In any case, life happens, people have to cope and do what they need to do. I don’t think the gov’t, or schools, should essentially dictate what people will be doing for their entire professional lives, or restrict access to education based on what someone says when they are in their late teens/early 20s.
I have to say I find it difficult to believe that you’ve actually gotten a post-grad education and gone into that specific field yourself, but if you haven’t I’d also understand better why you have adopted such an idealistic viewpoint.
It certainly does not promote a claim that such persons might use “their degree and experiences to write books that expand humanism and a respect for others”.We might want to put him on the"wasted" pile. 
This assumes that the person actually keeps up with changes in the profession, which not everyone does. In the case of pharmacy, that’s vital because new drugs are introduced, older drugs may be phased out and practices change.
Also, what’s important to remember is that pharmacy in general, and retail pharmacy in particular, is physically demanding. You’re on your feet constantly in one place; you don’t get many bathroom or meal breaks; you occasionally have to move heavy boxes; and you have to reach up over your head or stoop down to reach bottles on shelves. My father managed a pharmacy, and one of his best pharmacists had to quit. She’d had a baby and was in danger of really hurting herself just from the day-to-day demands of her job. IIRC, she found a job as a drug rep where she could still use her degree and experience, but she didn’t have the physical demands.
Robin
There are a lot of reasons why a woman planning on having children and staying home with them might also want to get a professional degree (and I haven’t heard of anyone attending graduate school for an “MRS degree” since I was a young teenager. How sexist and demeaning is that?!). I myself have a master’s in library science, and always planned on staying home with my kids if possible, which I currently do.
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Education as an intrinsic good. It’s good for you, it’s enjoyable, it’s interesting to get an education, and usually it will have good effects throughout life, even helping with raising a family. Surprising as it may seem to some Dopers, even SAHMs enjoy using their minds and find many opportunities along the way. Having an educated mother is also good for children; it sets a good example and is more likely to result in children who get educations themselves.
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Insurance. Any intelligent woman with a little foresight is going to want to acquire skills, because life is nothing if not uncertain. Death, divorce, layoffs, disability, financial problems–any of these can hit a family and require a former SAHM to support her family. It is only common sense to gain job skills while it’s easiest.
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I know very, very few SAHMs who never earn any money. Most of them do something to bring in some income, even if it’s only here and there. I am an extra-help librarian at the public library, and work a couple of days a month. I used to run a program as well, but the rest of my life got too busy and I had to cut down. A woman with certification or a degree (and any foresight) will exert some effort to keep up with her field–as many women I know do.
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Almost no one stays home forever. Most of the time, a SAHM will start working part-time once all the kids are in school. And once they’re off to college she’ll go back to full-time work. My own mother has been working full-time for 10 years and has another 15+ in front of her (besides the occasional work she did for years before that).
So, no, I do not believe that it is a “bad” or “selfish” choice for a woman to get a professional degree and then have children and stay home with them. It is an eminently sensible plan, and one which I believe benefits both families and society.