University of the Sciences — The Nation’s First Pharmacy College, Absorbed Into Its Jesuit Neighbor

Summary

The University of the Sciences, a small specialized university in the University City district of Philadelphia, traced its origins to 1821 and ceased to exist as an independent institution on June 1, 2022, when it merged into Saint Joseph's University, the Jesuit university roughly five miles up the road. It was the oldest pharmacy school in the United States — founded as the Philadelphia College of Pharmacy when sixty-eight apothecaries met in Carpenters' Hall to raise the standards of their trade — and for two centuries it had trained the people who compounded and dispensed the nation's medicine, including, in 1883, the first American woman to earn a pharmacy degree. The name is gone; the work it pioneered continues inside someone else's institution.

The mechanics were the now-familiar arithmetic of the specialized college. USciences was tuition-dependent and narrowly focused, and it ran into a double squeeze: a national decline in pharmacy-school applications and the broader demographic pressure on every small private college in the Northeast. By 2018 it was carrying a budget deficit of around $4.5 million; in 2020 both Fitch and Moody's downgraded its credit as it drew down its endowment at a rate analysts called unsustainable. In the summer of 2020 the university began, in its own framing, to look for a partner with the scale to carry its programs into the future.

It found one across town. Under the agreement completed in June 2022, Saint Joseph's absorbed the entirety of USciences — its academic programs, its 24-acre University City campus, its assets and its liabilities — with no money changing hands. Saint Joseph's retained about 140 of USciences' roughly 170 faculty (the rest received a full year's salary in severance), folded the health programs into a new College of Health Professions, and emerged as one of the ten largest universities in the Philadelphia region, with an endowment north of $500 million and nearly 9,000 students.

What USciences represents is the merger as a soft landing for a small but venerable institution — and the quiet completeness of absorption. No class was stranded; the buildings are full; the Philadelphia College of Pharmacy continues by name as a school within Saint Joseph's. But the independent university that incorporated standards for an entire profession in 1821, that issued degrees in its own right for two centuries, no longer exists. Its red-devil mascot was retired; the hawk flies over its campus now.

Timeline

The Apothecaries' College

USciences began as an act of professional self-respect. In February 1821, sixty-eight Philadelphia apothecaries — men who mixed and sold the era's medicines, often badly and without standards — met in Carpenters' Hall and resolved to do better. The Philadelphia College of Pharmacy was the result: the first school in the United States dedicated to the science of pharmacy, founded not by a state or a church but by practitioners determined to professionalize their own craft. For two centuries that origin shaped the institution's character. It was a working college, focused and unpretentious, that produced the people who stood behind the counter and compounded the prescriptions, and it accumulated genuine firsts along the way — among them Susan Hayhurst, who in 1883 became the first American woman to earn a pharmacy degree.

Over the twentieth century the college widened its remit, becoming the Philadelphia College of Pharmacy and Science in 1920 and finally the University of the Sciences in 1998, a small specialized university spanning pharmacy, the health professions, the laboratory sciences, and a modest business and arts core. It was never large and never tried to be. Its value proposition was the same one the apothecaries had bet on in 1821: rigorous, applied science in service of a profession. That model gave it a clear identity and a loyal output of pharmacists, physical therapists, and lab scientists. It also gave it almost no diversification — and a fortune tied tightly to the health of a single corner of the higher-education market.

The Narrow Market Narrows

A specialized university lives and dies by demand for its specialty, and in the 2010s the demand for USciences' flagship discipline turned. Pharmacy schools across the country, which had expanded aggressively in the 2000s, began struggling to fill their classes as the pipeline of applicants thinned and the perceived return on a costly professional degree came into question. USciences felt that contraction directly, and it arrived layered on top of the broader demographic pressure squeezing every tuition-dependent private college in the Northeast: fewer eighteen-year-olds, fiercer competition, less pricing power. A university with little to fall back on but tuition had no good way to absorb both at once.

The financial trace is unambiguous. After five years of slipping enrollment prompted a 2017 marketing campaign, the university posted a budget deficit of roughly $4.5 million in 2018. By 2020, Fitch and Moody's had downgraded its credit, pointing to endowment withdrawals at a pace they judged unsustainable — the classic signature of an institution covering operating gaps by spending the reserve that was supposed to outlast them. That summer, USciences' leadership did the prudent thing: rather than wait for the spiral to tighten, it began looking for a partner large enough to carry its programs forward. The decision to seek a merger from relative strength, with a campus and accredited programs still worth absorbing, is precisely what distinguished USciences' ending from the abrupt closures elsewhere in this archive.

The Five Factors

Aftermath

By the metrics that matter most in this archive, USciences landed softly. No student was cut off mid-degree; continuing students finished under Saint Joseph's, and the University City campus remained open and busy. The overwhelming majority of faculty kept their jobs, and those let go were paid out for a year. The health programs — pharmacy, physical therapy, occupational therapy — not only survived but anchored a new College of Health Professions at a larger, better-capitalized university, arguably with more resources behind them than USciences could have mustered alone. The Philadelphia College of Pharmacy, the original 1821 institution, continues by name. Even its museum, devoted to the history of American pharmacy, has since reopened.

The harder accounting is what the merger erased. The University of the Sciences — the independent, two-century-old university that incorporated professional standards for an entire field and granted degrees in its own right — no longer exists. Its governance dissolved into Saint Joseph's; its mascot and colors were retired; its identity folded into a Jesuit institution with a different mission and a different name on the gate. For alumni, the grief is the muted, ambiguous kind particular to the absorbed: the work endures, the campus thrives, and yet the alma mater itself is gone. Saint Joseph's read the moment correctly and repeated the move, acquiring another health-sciences college the next year. In a consolidating sector, USciences was less an exception than an early, orderly example of how the venerable but undersized university now most often ends — not with a closure, but with its name becoming a school inside a larger one's catalog.

Lessons

References

• Saint Joseph's absorbs a struggling institution across town Inside Higher Ed
• Here's how Saint Joseph's closed its University of the Sciences acquisition Higher Ed Dive
• The devil is dead. The hawk lives on. USciences is officially part of St. Joseph's University. The Philadelphia Inquirer
• Saint Joseph's University Completes Transformative Merger, Acquiring University of the Sciences Academic Programs and University City Campus Saint Joseph's University
• University of the Sciences Wikipedia