SoFi Blog

If you’re an aspiring pharmacist, you probably have a long list of wants and needs in a pharmacy school. You’d like a top pharmacy program with stellar faculty members and, because you want to put your four years of training to good use, you need a school that boasts a high rate of graduate employment and commands a great salary. After all, top pharmacy programs don’t come cheap.

In its study of first-year tuition and fees for Pharm.D. degree programs for 2016-2017, the American Association of Colleges of Pharmacy (AACP) reports that Pacific University, a private school in Oregon, is among the priciest pharmacy schools at $70,947 for both out-of-state and in-state students. On the other side of the tuition scale, the University of Toledo, a state school in Ohio, costs $17,390 for out-of-state students and $8,052 for in-state students.

Your tuition bills and mandatory student fees will certainly add up over four years. So, along with a degree, your future likely holds a fair amount of student debt. The AACP also reports that Pharm.D. graduates carry an average of $157,425 in student loan debt. For grads of private pharmacy schools, that figure shoots to $182,417; for students of Pharm.D. programs at public colleges and universities the loan debt average is slightly less, at $131,153. But the good news is that graduates also earn solid salaries. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), the median salary of pharmacists was $121,500 in 2015.

To help you decide which program is best for your career and financial goals, we’ve crunched the numbers from more than 19,000 student loan refinance applications from January 2014 to February 2017 to bring you the SoFi Return on Education (ROED) Pharmacy School Rankings.

In our latest SoFi member spotlight, we celebrate National Pharmacist Day with member Ashley Holmes, who explains how a teenage passion for chemistry led her to work as a Walmart pharmacist. After seven years of college, which left her with $120,000 of student loan debt, Ashley today successfully balances the professional demands of the only employer she’s ever known with the challenges of paying off her student loans, owning a home, and starting a family.