BSN is a joke

Nurses General Nursing

Published

I am a nurse at a major hospital where I have worked over a year after gaining my ASN. I have returned to get my BSN. What I'm not understanding is why there is such an ENORMOUS disconnect between what I do at work and the class work I need to do. It doesn'y apply at all. I have to take family care classes and informatics with very little practical application. I have to memorize all the rules of APA. My patients don't care if I can wrote a wonderful APA formatted paper. They just don't. It's like there is no appreciation in BSN education for what nursing is really about. At no time will I EVER do a CFIM on my patient or a PEEK readiness assessment. Get real. Where is the disconnect? Everyone I talk to say's the same thing about their BSN program, that it is completely useless. Who decided that nurses needed extensive training in social work and paper formatting?!?! I don't deal with social work. I have a team of social workers for that. At no time will I ever be in a patients home trying to improve the communication between family members ect. There are family counselors ect for that. It isn't my job! Yet here I am getting trained in areas I have no interest in, and will never ever use in my career. And for what? So I can say I have 3 letters behind my name and the school and hospital can make more money? Its a joke. I'm learning nothing of value. I would drop out and find a new school, but everyone I talk to has the same opinion about where ever they went. Basically healthcare has become obsessed with accolades, but forgot that those accolades were supposed to represent a level of expertise.

Why is there such an enormous disconnect between real life nursing and nursing education??!?!?

In my hospital, even middle management has to have our be matriculating to a master's degree.

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Because you have an expanded education base you have a broader perspective from which you can provide for your patients.

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Specializes in Critical Care.
Because you have an expanded education base you have a broader perspective from which you can provide for your patients.

I assume you're answering my previous question, what expanded education base are you referring to that makes you a more knowledgeable resource for your patients?

For instance, a patient is asking about the pathophysiology of diabetes and how the treatment plan fits into that, can it be reliably assumed that BSN can explain this better than an ASN?

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Specializes in Adult Internal Medicine.
ASN and BSN program curriculum have become essentially identical, so I'm curious how you believe that despite being taught under the same curriculum that BSN students will learn different things than ASN students.

Are you saying that ADN programs and BSN programs have the same curriculum? Can you share the curriculum and number of credits? I just have never seen this.

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Specializes in Adult Internal Medicine.
This does not require a degree. SMH.

It may not take a degree but it does take additional coursework, to say otherwise is ignorant. Of course additional coursework and experience in research methods leads to increased critical analysis, and participation, in research which is important to the profession on a population level.

I think all to often these debates turn into education vs experience at the bedside, but there is a lot more to nursing than bedside nursing.

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It may not take a degree but it does take additional coursework, to say otherwise is ignorant. Of course additional coursework and experience in research methods leads to increased critical analysis, and participation, in research which is important to the profession on a population level.

I think all to often these debates turn into education vs experience at the bedside, but there is a lot more to nursing than bedside nursing.

I never said additional coursework was unnecessary. But you do NOT have to have a degree to be able to understand and apply research principals. You DO have to avail yourself of additional educational opportunities that are available to you in order to do so but it most certainly does not have to be in a BSN program. Are any of you actually reading what I'm saying? It is not the education it's the person.

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Specializes in Neurosurgery, Neurology.
I never said additional coursework was unnecessary. But you do NOT have to have a degree to be able to understand and apply research principals. You DO have to avail yourself of additional educational opportunities that are available to you in order to do so but it most certainly does not have to be in a BSN program. Are any of you actually reading what I'm saying? It is not the education it's the person.

Do you need a degree to be able to understand apply...anything?

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Specializes in Adult Internal Medicine.
I never said additional coursework was unnecessary. But you do NOT have to have a degree to be able to understand and apply research principals. You DO have to avail yourself of additional educational opportunities that are available to you in order to do so but it most certainly does not have to be in a BSN program. Are any of you actually reading what I'm saying? It is not the education it's the person.

It's not about the person at all when you are looking at nursing as a profession (which is what all majors studies are doing)! There are always outliers, but on the whole and in aggregate, the more nurses that take additional research methods coursework the more nurses will be able to actively participate in research and application of that research. This is a basic principle of research methods!

We agree it does not have to be in a BSN program, coursework is coursework, a degree is a piece of paper. Again, in aggregate, the more people with the piece of paper that requires it, the more people with gain expertise with it.

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Specializes in Adult Internal Medicine.
Do you need a degree to be able to understand apply...anything?

No but you need the coursework and the experience!

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It's not about the person at all when you are looking at nursing as a profession (which is what all majors studies are doing)! There are always outliers, but on the whole and in aggregate, the more nurses that take additional research methods coursework the more nurses will be able to actively participate in research and application of that research. This is a basic principle of research methods!

We agree it does not have to be in a BSN program, coursework is coursework, a degree is a piece of paper. Again, in aggregate, the more people with the piece of paper that requires it, the more people with gain expertise with it.

Yes but it is up to the person to educate themselves beyond their foundation. What I'm saying is any nurse with any level of education can further themselves by taking courses and it does not require a degree to do so. There are people here posting this concrete idea that the ONLY nurses who can interpret and apply research to their practice are BSNs and that simply isn't true.

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Specializes in Adult Internal Medicine.
Yes but it is up to the person to educate themselves beyond their foundation. What I'm saying is any nurse with any level of education can further themselves by taking courses and it does not require a degree to do so. There are people here posting this concrete idea that the ONLY nurses who can interpret and apply research to their practice are BSNs and that simply isn't true.

It's not true absolutely, but in aggregate, may be more true than you think, especially if you (personally) are an outlier (and I don't mean the ability to access and interpret, I mean the expertise to do so in more depth).

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Specializes in Critical Care.
Are you saying that ADN programs and BSN programs have the same curriculum? Can you share the curriculum and number of credits? I just have never seen this.

The core nursing program for both an ADN and BSN degree is about 2 years of full time school, typically between 75 and 95 total credits. This was a few years ago so there may be more now, but at one point 14 states required all ASN programs to have articulation agreements with BSN programs, these agreements typically requires ASN programs to adopt the BSN programs core curriculums. In states that don't mandate these agreements, ASN programs still adopt the curriculums of their partnering BSN programs out of necessity. This is why ASN to BSN programs do not include any sort of remedial content, they are better described as post-Bac programs where the bachelor's is granted at the end of the post-Bac program.

20 years ago or more you could reliably say that BSN grads had taken a statistics class (typically 3-5 credits) while ASN grads had not, but that's not particularly accurate anymore, ASN programs now often require a statistics class as a prerequisite, and not all BSN programs require statistics. But as someone who's job includes implementing evidence into practice I can say that this (formerly) additional 3-5 credits taken by BSNs don't reliably translate into a better understanding of utilization of research.

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