Rural communities do not have a talent problem. They have a pathway problem.
By Ryan Gates, PharmD, Executive Dean and Senior Vice President, WGU Leavitt School of Health
When two pharmacies close
La Junta sits on the high plains of southeastern Colorado, an agricultural town of about 7,000 people along the Arkansas River. Two grocery stores with pharmacies shut down there. Residents lost more than a place to buy groceries.
Patients flooded the nearest pharmacy in Rocky Ford, 11 miles away. The prescription backlog stretched on for months. Some people drove nearly 100 miles to fill essential medications.
One disruption reshaped access across an entire region.
Pharmacists are the most accessible clinicians in any community. Across much of rural America, the pharmacist is the only clinician within a reasonable drive. Close the pharmacy and you close the front door to vaccinations, chronic disease management, medication counseling and the first conversation about a symptom someone would otherwise ignore.
The numbers behind the story
HHS estimates the United States will need 17,000 additional pharmacists by 2037. One in eight U.S. neighborhoods already qualifies as a pharmacy shortage area. Rural and underserved urban communities carry the heaviest share.
For a healthcare employer, one gap creates three problems at once. Staffing. Retention. Patient access.
Recruiting harder does not fix any of the three. Every rural hospital, clinic and pharmacy in the country is competing for the same small group of licensed clinicians. Raising your offer moves one person from another rural town to yours. It does not add a single pharmacist to the country. And the hire you win this way is often the hire you lose in a few years, when they’ve fulfilled their service requirement of the recruitment package and someone else raises theirs.
Why this is personal for me
Before entering higher education, I spent my career in clinical pharmacy and population health leadership. I worked in rural clinics, hospital systems and underserved communities across California's Central Valley. I trained as a pharmacist through the University of the Pacific and the VA Health Care System in San Diego, and I later led pharmacy residents and interdisciplinary care teams focused on expanding access.
The Central Valley taught me a lesson rural HR leaders already know. When there are not enough pharmacists, patients are the first to feel it. Wait times grow. Refills lapse. Adherence drops. Someone stretches a 30-day supply to 45 days and hopes for the best.
It also taught me where durable hires come from. The people who stay in rural communities are usually the people who were already there.
Recruitment is one lever. Development is the other.
The people you want to hire already work for you, in a different role. No job posting will reach them, because they are not looking.
What we build with CVS Health
A 2025 CVS Health survey found 40 percent of pharmacy technicians want to become pharmacists. Seventy-seven percent said tuition assistance would increase their likelihood of pursuing the career.
Read those two numbers together. Ambition is not the constraint. Cost and career disruption are.
A pharmacy technician in a rural town is already credentialed to work, already trusted by patients, already rooted in the community. Asking someone in the role to resign, relocate to a university town and absorb six figures of debt is a plan built to fail. Most decline. The ones who accept rarely come back.
So the question for your organization is not where to find candidates. It is whether the pathway from your current staff roster to your open clinical roles exists at all.
WGU's Leavitt School of Health and CVS Health launched a fully online pre-pharmacy degree in 2026, built for pharmacy technicians and other CVS colleagues.
The design solves for the two barriers technicians named:
- Cost. CVS Health offers up to $3,000 per year in reimbursement through its Enterprise Tuition Assistance Program, administered by EdAssist of Bright Horizons. Paired with an exclusive tuition rate of $3,989 per six-month term, the estimated maximum out-of-pocket cost lands under $10,000. The program also accepts transfer credit, which lowers time and cost further.
- Career disruption. The program is competency-based and fully online. Students advance when they demonstrate mastery, not when a semester ends. There are no set class times and no relocation. A dedicated program mentor supports each student. Technicians keep their income, their benefits and their place in the community while they complete the science, math and professional communication prerequisites required for PharmD admission.
Employees stay on the schedule. Patients keep their pharmacy. The community keeps the person it already trusts.
What the rural data shows
Skeptics of online education tend to assume rural learners enroll and disappear. Our data says otherwise.
From FY2020 through FY2025, WGU's Leavitt School of Health enrolled 20,772 rural students and produced 10,525 unique rural graduates. Rural learners live in every state. They finish. They practice in the communities they came from.
The more useful finding is where students fall out, because it is rarely academic performance. Three barriers end enrollments:
- Financial access. A $400 gap in a term closes a degree faster than a failed exam.
- Digital access. Bandwidth and device reliability shape completion in rural counties.
- Readiness support. Adults returning to science coursework after a decade away need structured on-ramps, not encouragement.
Programs addressing those three produce graduates. Programs skipping them lose students before the investment matures.
Four moves for healthcare HR leaders
- Ask your own workforce the question. Survey pharmacy technicians, medical assistants, nursing assistants and unit clerks about clinical goals and about what stops them. Quantify the internal pipeline before you build for it. The results will be higher than your leadership team expects.
- Price the specific barrier employees name. Broad tuition benefits with low caps and long reimbursement lags do little for a household living on a two-week cycle. Target the credential, cover the term and pay on a schedule people are able to plan around.
- Design around the job, not around the academic calendar. Any program requiring your employees to reduce hours or relocate will filter out the rural candidates you most want to keep. Online, self-paced and employer-integrated designs keep them working while they advance.
- Track the reasons people stop. Exit conversations focused on grades will mislead you. Ask about money, connectivity and preparation. Then fix what you find.
The talent is already there
Rural healthcare recruitment gets framed as a supply problem. In pharmacy, it is closer to an access problem inside your own building.
Forty percent of technicians want the white coat. Most will never reach it under the current model, and their communities will absorb the consequence for another decade.
Employers hold more leverage here than universities do. You know who your people are. You know what they earn. You know which of your locations sit 40 miles from the next open pharmacy. Pair that knowledge with a program built for working adults and the pharmacist your community needs in 2032 is already on your schedule this week.
La Junta is not an outlier. It is a preview. The response starts with the technician standing behind the counter today. ♦
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Author bio:
Ryan Gates is the Executive Dean and Senior Vice President of Western Governors University’s Leavitt School of Health, where he leads strategy, academic innovation, and workforce development across nursing and health programs nationwide. In this role, Dr. Gates is focused on strengthening the healthcare education pipeline, expanding access to high-quality training, and ensuring graduates are prepared to meet the real-world demands of patients, providers, and communities.
CONTACT: Chris Jones, Communications Manager, WGU Leavitt School of Health: chris.jones1@wgu.edu | 801-503-6705
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