Chapman University’s new School of Pharmacy is offering a five-year, fast-track path to a doctor of pharmacy degree with the help of a $500,000 grant from the Allergan Foundation, the charitable arm of Irvine-based drug maker Allergan Inc.
“The Allergan Foundation is proud to support this groundbreaking program,” David Pyott, chairman of the board and chief executive of the foundation, said in a statement. “There is an extremely high demand for pharmacy professionals in California and nationwide … [the school of pharmacy] stands uniquely poised to help fill the need quickly with this accelerated program.”
The gift will provide scholarships to five Orange County high school graduates—two boys and three girls—who will start Chapman’s two-year prepharmacy program this fall, building on their advanced high school work. They will enter the intense, three-trimester-a-year graduate portion of the pharmacy curriculum in the fall of 2016 and would graduate in 2019.
“The donation was a leg up for us to show the accreditors that we have the support of the business community in Orange County,” said Ronald Jordan, dean of the school.
The donation also shows that Allergan “recognizes and values what we are doing, and they anticipate that these are the type of graduates that they’re going to want to hire,” said Sheryl Bourgeois, Chapman’s executive vice president of university advancement. “It demonstrates there can be these wonderful corporate educational partnerships for the betterment of our society. It’s very exciting, and if we do this well, hopefully we’ll have other companies follow suit.”
A traditional path to a pharmacy degree involves eight years of study: four years to earn a bachelor’s degree, and another four of graduate work.
Jordan ran a similar fast-tracked program at the University of Rhode Island.
“It worked very well,” he said. “We had very bright high school students that knew what they wanted to do. They ended up becoming leaders in the profession.”
The five selected for the Allergan scholarships will be part of the school’s second class of 80 students, he said.
The first class of 60 will start their graduate studies in the fall of 2015 and will be comprised of candidates who have completed the 70-unit undergraduate requirement—a bachelor of science degree isn’t required.
Like a Job
Jordan equated the accelerated graduate program to a full-time job in which there’s no such thing as summers off.
“In a traditional program, students end up wasting a good period of those summers,” he said. “They become lifeguards at the beach, waitresses; that does not contribute to their career path. This is a year-round program, and in-between the trimesters there is a two-week break, so they have some time off.”
Accreditation Body
The school, located on Chapman University’s new Harry and Diane Rinker Health Science Campus in Irvine, will also get its first visit from an accreditation body in June 2015 whose members will “make sure it is a real school,” Jordan said, and to establish its “precandidate status.” A second visit will take place the following spring, with full accreditation expected when the first graduating class takes the licensing exam offered by the National Association of Boards of Pharmacy in 2018.
Jordan and his faculty team are “committed to do this well,” he said, and are in the process of hiring six professors. He’s also bringing in consultants this summer to help with the implementation of the “flipped classroom” teaching strategy in which students watch online lectures on their own, then discuss the material in class.
The school recently hired Jeff Goad as professor and chair of the Department of Pharmacy Practice, and Reza Mehvar as professor and chair of the Department of Biomedical and Pharmaceutical Sciences.
The pharmacy school will be the first for Orange County, where, according to Jordan, the need for such an institution is among the greatest in the U.S.
“Orange County exports the largest number of pharmacy school applicants in the country.”
