Until very recently, there was a tough choice facing those who thought they were interested in pursuing a pre-pharmacy career at USC after high school.
Unlike most other majors, pre-pharmacy students have their entire college careers planned out for them.
With the exception of a few electives, most of the courses are locked in place from the first semester freshman year onward.
Additionally, those who found out two years later that, disastrously, they were interested in music or oceanography or fashion merchandising instead had to drop out of USC and enroll again in a different major.
They then had to take two or more years of classes in order to get a B.S. in their new field, totaling 6 years at USC, a time and money commitment that not all students are willing — or able — to make.
Last Friday, the board of trustees decided to give the green light to a B.S. in pharmacy, giving these students the opportunity to graduate in four years with a degree, if they so choose. Additionally, it lowers our drop-out rates, which were artificially high when counting those who switched from pre-pharmacy.
The best part? No new expenditure is needed to make this change. It's all on paper. No new teachers and no new classes — just a different allocation of available resources.
Which brings up the question, why wasn't this change made earlier? Other colleges, like Clemson, offered such a program long before we did. Why wasn't the change made until now?
We're not quite sure what the answer is. Michael Amiridis said that the board should have made the change before now, but didn't provide any concrete reasons as to why this has taken so long.
What this means, on the whole, is that some problems seem part like of the woodwork. For a very long time, the locked-in nature of the pre-pharmacy program was an acceptable, necessary risk that everyone took. As it turns out, it was neither acceptable or necessary.
This begs the question: what other "acceptable" problems should we be looking at?