4.0 GPA ...Great memorizing abilities.Yes...Good thinking/reasoning skills maybe not!

missninaRN · Oct 22, 2006

Yes, some people drop for personal reasons. So far a few of my fellow students dropped due to family issues, a few decided that nursing was not for them, some of them couldn't pass drug calculations, and one student was killed in an accident.

Our admission standards were already quite stringent, and due to a very large number of applicants, the minimum GPA that got in was high as well. And our instructors are extremely competent. There has been no "weeding out" or breaking us down stuff going on.

Look at it this way. Not everyone who starts going to college this year will actually graduate. This is true in any field of study. Life happens. Students find that their chosen major isn't their cup of tea after all. Some are not quite mature enough to deal with the responsibilities of school (and those responsiblities are even bigger in nursing school.) Some of them have personal issues that prevent them from finishing. It is unfortunate that those seats that are given up could have been filled by someone else, but there is just no way of knowing at the start who will finish and who will not.

Kelly_the_Great · Oct 22, 2006

I've notice alot of posts regarding NS drop outs! Whats going on? Can it be that the instructors aren't competent enough? Is it that many students have other responsiblities besides NS( families, jobs, etc).I wonder if this also happens in MEd school!!

What does instructor competence have to do with "admission standards"???

SmilingBluEyes · Oct 22, 2006

There are many reasons for somewhat high drop-out rates in nursing school. I think as standards for admission rise, drop-out rates drop accordingly. Many people get into nursing school not knowing what awaits them, or finding they are not cut out for nursing, after all. This it not necessarily a bad thing. Nursing is not something we "just try out for fun" at all---nor is medicine. There are a lot of medical school drop-outs out there, too, believe me.

Really, you know by reading all these posts by now, nursing school is no walk in the park. But any reasonably-intelligent and hard-working student CAN make it. It takes organization, desire to succeed and just plain old honest hard work to make it happen. If you want it bad enough, you will make it to graduation day and pinning. You have to burn for it, to make it; but you can. But make no mistake; it is 100% up to you---not your instructors, the school, classmates or anyone else. YOU.

Tweety, BSN, RN · Oct 22, 2006

Yes, it does happen in med school, law school, the police academy............etc. The old stereotype of the stoned faced instructor saying "Look around you.....chances are the person sitting next to you won't be around when you graduate" is sad but true.

I think with the shortage of nursing instructors that bad instructors do fall through the cracks.

Good post above by Smilingblueyes.

smk1, LPN · Oct 22, 2006

I agree with have high standards for admissions. Nothing worse then seeing people taking a seat who aren't prepared to do what is required. However there are times when no matter how smart or prepared you are you will still struggle. Getting sick can easily cause a person to fail out depending on what was missed when you were sick. I remember back in A&P feeling so lucky to get into the class off of the wait list and there were people retaking A&P 1 for the third time and still not doing the required reading and studying needed to pass. It did anger me at times but that is just the way it is...

Alloramadai · Oct 22, 2006

YES, Yes, and yes. Raise those standards. We had 160+ in our nursing class at the start. We are now just over 100. Some students are not able to perform basic math skills to complete a drug calculation. One student asked the difference between an episiotomy and a c-section - this question was during our senior Mother-Baby course. And for those students who feel they don't need to be on time for class or clinical? Send them on their way. Who wants to wait at the end of the shift for their replacement to decide to come to work?

RNsoon! · Oct 22, 2006

What does instructor competence have to do with "admission standards"???

Who said Instructor competence had or should have an effect on Admission standards?? I SAID, perhaps one of the reasons students drop out/fail might be due to their Instructor's incompetence.Read Carfully .

Tweety, BSN, RN · Oct 22, 2006

Who said Instructor competence had or should have an effect on Admission standards?? I SAID, perhaps one of the reasons students drop out/fail might be due to their Instructor's incompetence.Read Carfully .

There are students that like to blame the instructors for their own failures. They can't make the cut and look to someone other than themselves to blame.

For sure there are bad instructors causing students to drop out. While I think that's a reason, it's not in the top 5 reasons. :)

Freedom42 · Oct 22, 2006

USA Today, citing figures from the American Association of Colleges of Nursing, recently reported that nursing schools turned away 41,000 "qualified" applicants in 2005. If that's the case, how much higher do you think admissions standards should be? I already hold a BS in another area and hope to transfer into a BSN program. My adviser has told me that the cutoff for transfer students last year was 3.7 -- and that is not for the accelerated program.

Yes, there are attrition problems. But -- and I am purely speculating here, not writing with any empirical data -- how many of these dropouts are people who are in fact well-qualified for admission but find out that, for one reason or another, conclude that nursing simply isn't for them? I'm a pre-req program that includes ADNs; some are already talking about dropping out because they're unhappy with the liberal arts requirements (and accompanying expense) for a BSN. And there are many students like me, people seeking second careers who find that they didn't know as much about nursing as they thought they did. That first semester is a real eye-opener. I'm sure there are plenty of others who realize they're simply not willing to make the commitment to intense studying.

Raising admission standards to impossible highs would be counter-productive, given the nursing shortage. Perhaps a better focus would be raising faculty salaries to attract and keep the best and brightest instructors. In my home state, the current faculty vacancy rate is between 7 and 8 percent. That can't encourage high-quality instruction, and it increases the pressure exponentially on teachers who already do a great job in the classroom.

SmilingBluEyes · Oct 22, 2006

Who said Instructor competence had or should have an effect on Admission standards?? I SAID, perhaps one of the reasons students drop out/fail might be due to their Instructor's incompetence.Read Carfully .

You said drop-out rates were affected by instructor competence (or lack thereof, really). And I simply disagree. It's a real cop-out to blame others when one flunks out of school. I can honestly say, all the people who dropped out of my class (and it was more than 1/2) needed to be dropped for one reason or another. The standards were clear and they failed to meet them. They could not blame the instructors, the school, or anyone else. If they wanted or needed to place blame, all they needed to have done is look no further than their bathroom mirror.

The same is true in nursing itself. When/if we make an error, or fail to meet standard of patient care, owning up and learning from it is critical. Finding out what went wrong and fixing the problem is not an option, it is a must. Personally, I found the students who did not own up to their own failings in the school were likely to be the same people who would refuse to own up later on, in their nursing careers. We don't need or want people like that in nursing. Sadly enough, not enough of these folks are weeded out in school and some do go on to to become nurses. And if you do were to do a topic search here, you would find threads that discuss, at length, these types who refuse to own up, have zero integrity, and cut corners in their patient care---and when pressed, will out and out LIE about what they did to cover their behinds. No one wants such people to be their nurse, or their loved ones' nurse. It is a tough job as a nursing professor/instructor to find these types early-on and get rid of them before they go on to become nurses and harm or kill someone one day.

I remember talking to my nursing school superintendant when I was in school, and she said she used to lose sleep over the students who slipped through her fingers, passing and later, graduating, because they had done nothing blatant to flunk out---she worried they would go on to hurt others due to lack of integrity or sneaky tendencies. I felt for her; it was not an easy job to do.

Rare is the drop-out student who can completely blame his or her instructors' incompetence for failing out of school. Really rare.

Tweety, BSN, RN · Oct 22, 2006

USA Today, citing figures from the American Association of Colleges of Nursing, recently reported that nursing schools turned away 41,000 "qualified" applicants in 2005. If that's the case, how much higher do you think admissions standards should be? I already hold a BS in another area and hope to transfer into a BSN program. My adviser has told me that the cutoff for transfer students last year was 3.7 -- and that is not for the accelerated program.
Yes, there are attrition problems. But -- and I am purely speculating here, not writing with any empirical data -- how many of these dropouts are people who are in fact well-qualified for admission but find out that, for one reason or another, conclude that nursing simply isn't for them? I'm a pre-req program that includes ADNs; some are already talking about dropping out because they're unhappy with the liberal arts requirements (and accompanying expense) for a BSN. And there are many students like me, people seeking second careers who find that they didn't know as much about nursing as they thought they did. That first semester is a real eye-opener. I'm sure there are plenty of others who realize they're simply not willing to make the commitment to intense studying.
Raising admission standards to impossible highs would be counter-productive, given the nursing shortage. Perhaps a better focus would be raising faculty salaries to attract and keep the best and brightest instructors. In my home state, the current faculty vacancy rate is between 7 and 8 percent. That can't encourage high-quality instruction, and it increases the pressure exponentially on teachers who already do a great job in the classroom.

Good post. I was leaning this way because when I read the original post I was thinking "aren't admissions standards already pretty high?", but I'm a bit out of the loop having gone to a "first come first in" school years ago, but even that has changed and they've become competetive.

It would be nice if there were greater retention, but I'm not sure what can be done about it.