Like many of the other new graduate nurses who post and review this board I am a new graduate nurse who is still unemployed after five months. Nursing is a second career, one that I had high hopes that would provide me with both emotional and financial rewards. As of right now it as provided me with neither. I must admit if my expectations are disappointed it's partially my fault. No not that the job market sucks and that hospitals and to a lesser extent other nursing facilities do not want to take on new graduates. My fault was not doing my research and seeing that this has been going on for a few years and likely would be occurring after I graduated. That being said, here is the hypocrisy that I find so offensive, the same hospitals that do not want to spend money on new graduate training, have no problems taking young students money, when they attend their nursing programs. Of course the hospitals will say that the nursing programs are separate entities, no rational person could buy that argument. Nursing schools and hospitals are so tightly connected they are like siamese twins. Many of the administrators have dual roles as nursing deans and professors. Of course this behavior, where the uneducated consumer is taken advantage of goes on all the time in our economy, in fact it's how our economy was formed and thrives. I just think that maybe they should stop selling nursing as a noble profession, where people genuinely care and describe it for what they have made it, a business, with ethnics no different then any other business.
