I'm amazed that after so many threads on this subject people are still getting it so wrong. In answer to the OP's question- a good pharmacist gets paid pretty much the same as a crap one upon qualifying, which is about £40-50K in community, and in my experience a good pharmacist is just as likely to have a 2/2 as a first, which you tend to get if you spend 24 hours a day revising and says nothing whatsoever about your ability to communicate with patients. If I took on a PhD student, I'd want someone with a first, but a practising community/hospital pharmacist, totally irrelevant. If we ever get to the stage where there are more pharmacists than jobs (unlikely thanks to 100 hour pharmacies) I can gurantee that there are 101 different attributes more important to an employer than what degree class a pharmacist got before they even did their pre-reg, which is is where you really learn the job.