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.

Concerns about the rising cost of college in the United States—and the $1.4 trillion in student loan debt nationwide—are alive and well.

And they’ve prompted a lot of discussion about the different ways our educational peers nearby, across the pond, and beyond handle student loan repayment programs. When it comes to tuition costs and paying off student loans, the American system is unique—and not for all the reasons you might think.

It turns out that cheap or even free tuition doesn’t mean the end of student loans. Student loans are common even in countries with free tuition, because no matter where you go to college, you have to live somewhere and, of course, eat.

Sweden gets a lot of attention because tuition there is free. Still, Swedish students borrow money for college just as frequently as Americans do—and about 70% of students in both countries have student loans. But Swedish students graduate with about $20,000 in debt, compared to about $30,000 for American graduates.

To explore how the rest of the world pays for learning, we looked at the most recent QS World University Rankings. Thirty-two of the top 100 schools are in the U.S. Another 32 are found in just four countries: the United Kingdom, Germany, Australia, and Canada. Below, we compare the way higher education is financed in all five nations, in descending rank order.

If you’re a young lawyer working at a law firm, you probably envision being named partner someday. But, as you know, the road to partnership can be tough to traverse, even for the most prepared associate—and it’s only gotten more rigorous in recent years. Consider this: The number of equity partners at firms has increased by only 27% over the past 15 years, while the number of all other attorneys has increased by nearly 86%. Additionally, the demand for law firm services has been fairly stagnant for the past eight years, with the exception of a brief rise in 2011, according to the 2016 Report on the State of the Legal Market. The increasing competitiveness among firms has resulted in a thinning of the ranks for equity partners, which means a much longer timeline to being named one, if at all.

While you can’t predict whether you’ll be named partner, you still have significant ability as an associate to steer your career in the right direction. Because it’s now more difficult than ever to make partner, you’ll want to know if you are on the right track, so you can come up with a game plan to reach that goal more quickly—or decide whether you want to pursue other options.

Is 2017 the year you score a new and exciting job? If so, you’ll need a plan. Whether you want to move up within your current organization or land a bigger, better position elsewhere, here are six steps to help you think through your game plan.