Is Pharmacy worth it?

Hi,
I've just received an unconditional for RGU and I'm still waiting to see if I get an offer from Strathclyde. I came on here to see if anyone else had been accepted, however, somehow fell down a rabbit hole and ended up reading forum after forum about how Pharmacy is a 'dying job' and how it isn't paid well - even though the average annual salary online is good.
Pharmacy has always been what I wanted to do but now, I'm worried that I am making the wrong choice. I don't want to do a 4 year degree just to find out that I can't get a job anywhere and I'll be, and I quote from another forum, depressed since it's such a bad job.
I've also applied to Pharmacology and Immunology (not received any offers) , the course really was just as a back up in case I didn't get into MPharm but now I'm wondering if I should properly consider it, despite having an unconditional for one of my top choices.
Does anyone else have these worries? Does anyone have any advice? Also, has anyone got offers from RGU, if I do accept, I'd love to know some people on the course.

MPharm is a great choice because it's almost guaranteed long term employment. You have no outside competition, the pay is extremely good considering most other graduate roles are £25k and it's so hard to land a job these days. It's a strong and stable career that guarantees a life of middle class although you won't be making £100k unlikes doctors and lawyers.

Sorry, Andy, but I disagree with almost everything you have said. If this was 1993, then yes, I would agree with you. This is the problem in 2020 in pharmacy, it is still being 'sold' to prospective students on outdated information. i'm not going to re-type everything, but you can check my history of posts that will refute most of what you say. I really wish it were all still true, but the only bit is at the end, you certainly won't be making 100k. The average pharmacist salary is 42k and in community it's 36k from stats from 2019.

Interesting user-name!
I would certainly read the 'stickies' in the comments, and there is a thread about robots and AI to read, and about Amazon registering "Amazon Pharmacy" in the UK, very quietly at the start of the whore corona-thing!

If I was in my mid to late teens, I would be looking at the future and where the jobs will be and what industries are going to appear or grow. Two thirds, that's about 65% of pharmacy graduates end up in retail community pharmacy. Now, as we have seen during the pandemic, bricks and mortar retail is going downhill fast. There is an announcement nearly every week of another well-knows company in trouble or going bankrupt. The latest is Jaegar Fashions.

So anyway looking at future jobs, pharmacy will likely become much more 'fulfilment centre' roles. e.g. working in a warehouse probably checking scripts before it is all passed on to a robot and a checking technician at the end. So, lots less roles for community pharmacies.
There are other posts of mine you can read about the demise of retail, and the High Street.
So looking for a job in the future, I would be looking at up and coming or expanding industries. Obviously computer, and the internet and coding, if you are lucky to be good enough to understand all that stuff and all the algorithms!
E-commerce and delivery. The energy industry solar, wind, and the demise of oil and petrol vehicles and new clean energy, and batteries for electric cars we all may be driving by 2040/45.
Those into banking and finance may wish to study cryptocurrency. I think as I write both crypto and the Dow Jones have both hit new all-time highs!
Science-wise I think gene therapy and biotech will start to play a bigger role in medicine development, and tailoring meds to specific genetics of people. But that's probably a couple of decades away.
So basically, what I'm saying is, pharmacy is a good course, but I'm not sure if you might find better courses to do with regards to future tech and science developments than pharmacy. so research, research research!

I agree pharmacy is going downhill like the majority of other degrees. But honestly I don't think it's as bad as humanities and traditional STEM. Most graduates nowadays only get barely minimum wage jobs and the competition is like 1000 for 5 places. Oversaturation happens in every hot subject just look at how applications for computer science and data science exploded in the last few years, even though programming jobs never last long and almost no one stays in it after the age of 40.

I guess this leaves medicine as the final stable degree

I think people like us always think the scenery is better on the other hill!

I come from a pharmaceutical science background and went to computing. I can tell you biomed is way too oversubscribed. Just look at KCL, half of their courses are biomed, the job/applicant ratio is so bad most grads would be lucky to get an entry level DNA analyst role for 25k. To get a promotion you need a PhD and that's a hard pyramid to climb because the luck component is a lot more important than your endeavors (your supervisor, how successful your experiments went, how many papers you publish etc...)

Unfazed by the illusion, many STEM students like me transferred to CS (more specifically, data science). Again the industry can't grow forever and the inflation in application number outpaced the growth of the industry. Nowadays more and more DS job requires years of experience and the competition is quite bad and will get worse. As I said before, none of these jobs last long and the industry has a severe bias against mid-aged men.

Crypto is overhyped and a very niche field of CS, environmental science = no job simply because too many grads for the few roles in battery research.