Associate Online Degree Programs | RX for Success: A Pharmacy Career

Posted by bposton on November 17th, 2006 — Posted in associate online degree programs

What would happen if no pharmacists were available to fill your prescription at the local drugstore, or to recognize medication errors in the emergency room?

Not a good thing to me…

Believe it or not, that could be reality if America doesn’t train another 150,000 pharmacists by 2020. That’s according to the U.S. Department of Labor, which reports that 7,000 to 10,000 pharmacist positions are left unfilled every year.

Does that sound like a career opportunity?

Pharmacy graduates can expect a variety of possible career directions as well as four or five job offers. The mean annual wage of is $77,050, and you can choose from a wide variety of employment settings, from research laboratories to poison control centers to veterinary clinics.

To help teachers encourage students to pursue a career in pharmacy, health and
science, the pharmaceutical company Roche created a free teacher’s guide in collaboration with the Parenteral Drug Association Foundation for Pharmaceutical Sciences Inc. and WLIW New York public television.

The guide is designed to help teachers identify students with an interest in science and show them how to engage students in dialogue about career opportunities in pharmacy. It includes profiles of students who have pursued a career in pharmacy, a list of colleges and professional organizations and a student self-assessment tool.

Would you succeed in a pharmacy career? You should consider the following:

 -  Are you good at math?

 -  Are you interested in science, especially biology and chemistry?

 -  Are you detail-oriented and focused?
 
-  Do you care about others and want to make a positive contribution to society?

-  Would you be interested in a career that offers the opportunity to work anywhere in the country?

If you answered yes, the maybe a career as a pharmacist is the right prescription for you :-)

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Associate Online Degree Programs | Ninth Graders - 10 years later

Posted by bposton on November 16th, 2006 — Posted in associate online degree programs

I say this statistic in the USA Today, and it just blew me away…

Let’s take 100 ninth graders in high school, and follow them for the next 10 years. Here’s what we’ll find:

 - At the end of four years, 68 of these 100 ninth graders will graduate from high school.

 - Of those 68 high school graduates, only 40 of them will immediately enroll in college. 

 - Of those 40 that enrolled in college, only 27 are still there the following year.

 - And of these 27 students, 18 of them will graduate within 6 years.

So after 10 years, only 18 of the 100 wide-eyed ninth graders have made it - they have a college degree in there hands.

Doesn’t that just blow you away?

Ben  

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Associate Online Degree Programs | Should colleges do a better job of reporting?

Posted by bposton on November 16th, 2006 — Posted in associate online degree programs

As a follow-up to my last post, the US Department of Education has suggested that colleges start collecting and reporting data on student improvement at their schools.

What’s interesting is that there are already tools out there that colleges can (and many do) already use to do this data gathering.

For example, the National Survey of Student Engagement is a collection of data for both 4 year and 2 year schools that measure the time and effort seniors and freshmen say they put into various educational activities.

And as I mentions, many colleges are already using these tools. The problem is, they are not reporting the data to the public, or they’re making it very difficult to find on their websites. And of course, there is no way right now to link any of this data together so that you can compare the data across many colleges.

So that’s why the Department of Education is proposing that the Federal Governement provide matching funds for colleges and states that publicly report this data. And they have the dream of linking all this data to one main website - theirs.

So that’s the crux of the issue with the USDE’s recommendations. How much is the Goverment willing to get involved in the collection and reporting of how well students are doing (like the No Child Left Behind act is forcing primary schools to do) and how willing are the colleges and universities in the US to do so.

Ben 

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associate online degree programs | Margaret Spelling in the hot seat

Posted by bposton on November 15th, 2006 — Posted in associate online degree programs

Seems like good ol’ Miss Spelling is in the hot seat again.

Yesterday’s USA Today had a front page article about how she’s having to defend her plans to reform the USA’s higher education system.

Well, what do you expect? She compared getting a college degree to “buying a car” in that you need to compare schools to make sure you’re getting your money’s worth.

That’s a little too simple an anology for me. how about you?

Now, I agree that we do need to have a better way to compare colleges, but there’s so much subjectivity in all of that, I really don’t think Uncle Sam can do a better job than say the US News and World Report, which ranks colleges every year.

Oh by the way, Miss Spelling created the ”commission” that studied and made the recommendations that she’s now trying to put in place. A monopoly of ideas? Well, one commission member thought so. He refused to sign the commission report, stating that it created a “fake sense of crisis”. 

More on this later

Ben

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