Question raised from newbie question thread

I just graduated and it was never an issue. I know people from at least 4 other schools and have never heard of this. Are they just cramming the students in to get the money, but not having the true space for them? I definitely would not have gone somewhere that told me that.

Good luck!

Those rumors have been around for many years. Ignore them. Typically the number of nursing students allowed in clinicals are based on the state's Board requirements. In other words--one teacher = 10 students max per clinical section. So, if the teacher has 2 sections, she/he has 20 clinical students. If the teacher has only 1 section, she/he has only 10 students. It isn't the school freezing them out of clinicals, it is state requirements. And, the schools, unless they have changed that much in the 2 years since I last taught, limit enrollment based on that. They usually don't admit to the program only to not allow students into clinicals. They may have to scramble to find enough qualified faculty to accommodate the student numbers, but they really do want qualified students to be given the clinical opportunities.

This happened during my LPN program. We were a very smart class so where they were able to eliminate the "shouldn't have bothered's" from previous classes, they actually had to hire the LPN secretary for the program as a teacher so that we were all able to go to clinicals. It was actually amusing, the old hags never got the better of our class and we had the highest graduation rate since they had started the program.

Sufficient hours of supervised clinical experience is an integral, required component of any nursing program (LPN or RN). I've never heard of a school accepting more students than it can accommodate in clinical -- the state BONS dictate the number of students each school is allowed to accept, and schools need to be able to show the BON that they have sufficient faculty and clinical sites to accommodate the number of students they are applying for.

If schools are enrolling more students than they can provide clinical "slots" for, something fishy is going on ...