What is the difference between Dpharm and Bpharm?

Answer 1

Answer 1: In the United States, the normative professional degree in order to become a registered pharmacist has long been the "Bachelor of Science in Pharmacy" (BSPh) or some similarly-named degree. The precise name of the degree has always been more or less up to the school, and so there are some older "Bachelor of Pharmacy" (BPharm or BPh) degrees out there.

Regardles of the name, the degree to become a pharmacist has always been a professional degree (as opposed to an academic one) of five to six years duration. Basically, the first two years are the same freshman and sophomore years as any other bachelors degree, and then the actual pharmacy studies begin in the junior year; and then instead of graduating in only two (junior and senior) years, there's an additional year or two required. And, again, all of that depended on the school, and the requirements of the state in which either the school was physically located, or the graduate hoped to practice.

Not too long ago, the accreditor of pharmacy schools that's approved by the US Department of Education (USDE), and the USDE-sanctioned Council for Higher Education Accreditation (CHEA), changed the name/designation of the degree to be at the doctoral level: A "Doctor of Pharmacy" (DPharm or PharmD, depending on the school) degree. However, the basic coursework and when and how it all works remained pretty much unchanged. Under the new PharmD or DPharm paradigm, the student may either enter a six-year Doctor of Pharmacy program, or go to regular college for the freshman and sophomore years, and then enter a four-year Doctor of Pharmacy program. In either case, it's still six years of college/university which begins immediately after high school graduation. So, in that sense, it's much the same as before.

So, then, how do they get away with calling it a "doctoral" level program if it's really just a bachelors degree with a couple of years tacked onto it? If anything, it should be called a masters degree, based on that.

Well, that's how professional (as opposed to academic) degrees sometimes work. A law degree is called a "Juris Doctor" (JD), even though it's a three-year-long program and begins immediately after one gets a four-year bachelors degree. In the academic world, any degree immediately after the bachelors is a masters degree of some kind. And in the case of a law degree, the proof that the JD is not really a "doctoral" level degree is that the next-higher degree for which a JD is requisite for entry is what's called a "Master of Laws" (LLM) degree.

Not all professional degrees are this way, but many are. In the case of the "Doctor of Pharmacy" degree, it's the same bachelors/masters-level degree that it always was, but the accreditor simply decided to have its accredited pharmacy program schools start calling it a doctoral degree... to make it seem more impressive, perhaps.

So, there is no functional difference -- at least not in the U.S. -- between a "bachelor of pharmacy" and a "doctor of pharmacy" degree. The alleged doctoral-level version is just a change in name/designation.