Are Nursing schools hurting Nursing?

Nursing Students General Students

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First, please consider the attributes of your personal prototype of The Perfect Nurse. What adjectives would you use? Sensitive, caring, compassionate, patient, intelligent?

Now consider the gauntlet students have to run merely to get accepted into Nursing school.

Are the sensitive, caring, compassionate and patient being weeded out in order to make way for and to reward the competitve? And what is that doing to Nursing?

Hey, I'm just a freshman plodding through my pre-reqs, and my psych class this evening included a mention of "Achievement Motivation." Just trying to put 2 and 2 together, and I sometimes phrase things bluntly to elicit responses (I wonder in which chapter that sort of behaviour is covered?:p)

Do you have any evidence that folks choosing nursing as a career for the financial security is a new phenomena (or that folks who choose nursing as a career for the financial security aren't compassionate nurses?)? I would be really surprised. Nursing attracts a lot of people for a lot of different reasons.

Just conversations with a few other applicants that admitted as much. = )

And I agree with the previous posters who stated that there really isn't one universal way to test for all the qualities of what makes a good nurse. I honestly think that schools do their best with selecting students, be it a points-based system or not. Curiousme has made excellent points, when there are 500 applications and 60 slots, there has to be formalized criteria in place--even if it does seem like a cold way to do it.

Congratulations to EVERYONE who has worked hard. I am applying in September (with a 4.0 if my hard work pays off, and a little luck). Although my school has stated that a 4.0 in Nursing is next-to-impossible (3 people in 15 YEARS?!) I hope I will beat the odds as you have.

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LiveToLearn, you have my deepest respect. I'm glad you have that type of program, and I would be lucky to have you teaching me.

But I stand by my initial observations. We may well be screening for the wrong thing, and hoping the "right" kind of person survives the process, rather than identifying them early on and helping the along.

Your program seems different, and that's wonderful. I clearly (at present) am in a dysfunctional one. I see the people leading it and I see the people poised to be graduated from it, and it scares me. I look at the Nurses the program has produced (from my recent perspectives as a patient) and I pray I never get so sick again that I have to be around these people.

I also suggest there's a difference between a Nurse who is technically competant but emotionally bankrupt, and a sweet "box of rocks" type. I think I'd go with the latter....assuming he or she managed to sweet-talk the NCLEX in the first place.

I'm sorry that you're not finding your program to be what you think it should be. But you're presenting your comments like what is happening at your school is happening nationwide. That is what I don't see any evidence of. I can't think of even one person in my program (in all three years or classes of the program) who I would call emotionally bankrupt.

LivetoLearn doesn't teach at my school, yet what she describes has definitely been my nursing school experience. The folks who have graduated my program not only have compassion for their patients, but have compassion for the students coming up behind them. They reach out to us via mentoring programs, but mostly unofficially....just checking in with us through the program to see how we are doing. My classmates volunteer their time doing health care screenings in areas where folks don't have access to affordable health care. I'm happy to say that I've witnessed my classmates showing compassion to each other, their patients and the community....and they were all 4.0 or pretty darn close to 4.0 students.

I'm terribly sorry that the examples in front of you suggest that getting good grades and compassion are mutually exclusive. That has got to be somewhat demoralizing and I could see it deterring folks from not working to achieve academically (just so as to not be tarred with the same brush)....not that I'm saying that's what is happening to you...you're obviously excelling academically. Truly, I think that what you describe sounds like more of a product of the program you're in, than the students they are screening for.

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Specializes in ER, ICU, Education.

Absolutely, the culture of a nursing program definitely plays a part. For example, two programs could both have grads with the same pass rate, all with extremely high GPAs. Yet one program could keep GPAs high through instilling fear of failure and eviction from the program, a very competitive and cut-throat environment, while the other values doing your personal best and performing to the best of your capabilities. OP, I would suggest looking for a mentor with the traits you value, and this may help to better balance your nursing school experience.

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I don't believe that one has to be inheritly competitive in order to find success in a competitive enviroment. I'm not a competitive person, I just knew the facts...If I didn't earn a high GPA then I wouldn't get into nursing school. I never viewed it as "I gotta do better than everyone else" just that these are the current standards therefore I must meet them.

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I second LtL's comments -- I was an excellent student in undergrad and graduate programs in nursing, but that doesn't mean I was cold or uncaring or had the "wrong" motivations for entering nursing. I have also had similar experiences as a nursing faculty member.

Just a reminder -- it wasn't that long ago that nursing school faculties chose students based on their impressions of who would make the "best" nurses (and you could get kicked out of school once you were in simply because the faculty decided you weren't working out after all), and that process, imperfect as it was, factored in all those intangible, subjective factors like "caring" and "compassion." The reason this changed is because disappointed applicants who didn't get accepted started suing nursing schools for accepting "less qualified" applicants over them and not having an objective, measurable admissions selection process. That is when everyone started going to "points" systems, weighing GPAs so heavily, and all the other stuff that now drives applicants crazy. Nursing schools have struggled over time to come up with an admissions process that will satisfy everyone, and have so far failed (not surprisingly -- I doubt such a thing is possible), and, until they come up with some perfect, "magic" system that will please everyone all of the time, they've opted to go with the system they can't get sued over ...

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IS, I wonder....are you comparing public and private schools? I'm not sure what the second school is. Private schools can afford to be a little more "whole person" because of the tuition that they charge! = )

Here's a few other things that I wondered--

Could the people that are competitive, cutthroat, etc. in school, actually be great, compassionate nurses? I think so. Sometimes situations change people. One has to try to roll with the punches on their behavior. I'm horribly non-competitive, but knowing that I can't just sign up and walk right in has really pushed me to acheive.

The second thing I wonder is--once one is actually IN the nursing program, maybe there is still pressure to excel (which is good) but not so much COMPETITION. I have a feeling that most people in the program are close knit, and kind of like "boot-camp buddies". In the program, I have a feeling people WANT a student (and their peers) to succeed.

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My Chem professor, without knowing it and without even being aware of this discussion, just threw gasoline all over it.

I asked him idly this morning if I was right to let my advisor (at the program I'm transferring to) talk me out of taking Forensic Science. Editing out his usual cheerful profanities, he told me to take whatever looked interesting. He then pointed out he was on the selection committee of a rather large university school of medicine (the one right down the road from you, BM3). He says they now ask applicants about oddball courses they took, and the committee has lately been taking a bunch more people out of arts programs instead of sciences and pre-med and hauling them off to Doctor School.

OhMyGosh, a deliberate attempt to find "the right people" and not just the ones with the right scores in the right classes!

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My Chem professor, without knowing it and without even being aware of this discussion, just threw gasoline all over it.

I asked him idly this morning if I was right to let my advisor (at the program I'm transferring to) talk me out of taking Forensic Science. Editing out his usual cheerful profanities, he told me to take whatever looked interesting. He then pointed out he was on the selection committee of a rather large university school of medicine (the one right down the road from you, BM3). He says they now ask applicants about oddball courses they took, and the committee has lately been taking a bunch more people out of arts programs instead of sciences and pre-med and hauling them off to Doctor School.

OhMyGosh, a deliberate attempt to find "the right people" and not just the ones with the right scores in the right classes!

This may be a new phenomenon for that particular med school (or your professor), but it's been discussed in the larger medical school community for at least a few decades -- the academic medical community started noticing a couple decades or so ago (I was hearing about the debate at that time) that the young men (and, at the time, it was basically all men) who hadn't thought about anything since age 12 except how to get into med school didn't necessarily make the best physicians, and maybe the schools should look at a wider range of criteria and admit people with a wider range of experience and interests. I don't really have any reason to keep up with these things nowadays, but I thought "pre-med" as a major had pretty much died out in most places, and people from all kinds of backgrounds have been getting admitted to med school for quite some time now. The med school at the big university where I took my MSN took people of all ages and all backgrounds -- 15 years ago -- but they were still all excellent, top-tier students, or they wouldn't have gotten in.

I'll bet the same is true of the school you're referring to -- it still isn't going to start admitting students who didn't have excellent grades in their science pre-reqs and overall academic coursework ...

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My Chem professor, without knowing it and without even being aware of this discussion, just threw gasoline all over it.

I asked him idly this morning if I was right to let my advisor (at the program I'm transferring to) talk me out of taking Forensic Science. Editing out his usual cheerful profanities, he told me to take whatever looked interesting. He then pointed out he was on the selection committee of a rather large university school of medicine (the one right down the road from you, BM3). He says they now ask applicants about oddball courses they took, and the committee has lately been taking a bunch more people out of arts programs instead of sciences and pre-med and hauling them off to Doctor School.

OhMyGosh, a deliberate attempt to find "the right people" and not just the ones with the right scores in the right classes!

Hmmm, so having applicants talk about oddball classes and taking applicants who have BA's instead of BS's (which isn't a new trend...I have 2 friends who have been MD's for years who had undergrad degrees in music education and History respectively) is their attempt to find "the right people"? How does someone having a BA in Chemistry instead of a BS in Chemistry demonstrate compassion?

The thing with med school is that even if they did get a BA in music education, they still had to "get the right grades, in the right classes" to get to the interview for med school. They demonstrated that they can graduate with a Bachelors degree, that they excelled in their science classes and that they test well (they all have to take the MCAT). Hmmm...that all sounds suspiciously like the criteria nursing school's are looking for....

As they have a sufficient pool of folks that meet those criteria, and as a graduate program med school is significantly more expensive than a CC RN program, they then have the staff to individually interview their top candidates.

Sorry, I'm not seeing the gasoline....

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I'm not surprised. My point all along has not been that people shouldn't do well in school. The points has been that picking one criterion and assuming anyone who does well by that single standard will do well in all the other areas needed is...well...dumb.

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I'm not surprised. My point all along has not been that people shouldn't do well in school. The points has been that picking one criterion and assuming anyone who does well by that single standard will do well in all the other areas needed is...well...dumb.

But I guess I just keep coming back to....what is it you want the CC to do? What criterion do you think will help them make a better choice? How much more $$ are you willing to pay in your application fee to enact that change?

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I'm not surprised. My point all along has not been that people shouldn't do well in school. The points has been that picking one criterion and assuming anyone who does well by that single standard will do well in all the other areas needed is...well...dumb.

All medical schools do have criteria that must be met regardless of the degree you have attained and an acceptance into medical school is directly linked to your gpa. In fact most medical schools won't even look at an application unless you have a high enough gpa. Medical schools are using the same type of standards that most nursing schools do. They have a list of criteria that must be met regardless of whether an individual has a degree in history or basketweaving and if you have a low gpa or don't have the correct classes it doesn't matter how compassionate or brilliant you are.

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