How are Schools getting away with pumping out so many new graduates for no jobs?

[AlleycatLady, BSN, MSN, NP]

Question: How are Schools getting away with pumping out so many new graduates for no jobs?

Thoughts: My first thought on this is that there is a lack of education or better yet lack of information discovered by students prior to taking the plunge. Then couple this with all of the public announcements in the media about a "Nursing Shortage"...Next thing you know, everybody wants to get into nursing.

I think that if someone wants to learn the field of nursing, then they should by all means DO IT! Nothing should stop your dreams. What I don't agree with is all of the media exaggeration in regards to a nursing shortage. Dont get me wrong. In locations where there is a nursing shortage it should be stated and addressed. Nursing schools should not be taking advantage of students be perpetuating the lie. Some of the costs to go to accelerated BSN programs is ridiculous...you might as well go to med school at those prices! I think that there should be a law that says that the schools will only be allowed a certain number of students based on the guarantee of a certain amount of new graduate jobs per year for the areas. Also, schools and hospitals should be required to provide residency type jobs after graduation at lower wages. Another option could be for the nursing schools to create an entrepreneurial track for students to have more options.

Nurses are not Doctors, but if doctors had to face this challenge after graduation, do you think that they would risk wasting their money on a slim chance that they would get a job?

-Zenally

[CrunchRN, ADN, RN]

No, doctors would not allow this to happen. Neither would most of the other health professions. Sigh.

[elkpark]

Schools offer education, not jobs. It is up to the individual prospective student to do the research and make a choice s/he can live with about a major. If schools were legally required to close or reduce departments if the graduates couldn't easily find jobs in their field when they graduated, there wouldn't be a single college or university in the country that still had a fine arts or philosophy department, and the entire country would be poorer for that.

It is very easy to reduce or close a nursing school, and very hard to start one up or significantly increase the capacity of an existing program. If a bunch of programs were reduced or shut down now, we really would be in serious trouble the next time an actual shortage came along. College students are, with few exceptions, adults. IMO, the burden is on them to make a smart choice for themselves about higher education; it's not the responsibility of the school.

[CrunchRN, ADN, RN]

Normally i would agree Elkpark. However there are a lot of people spending a lot of time and money perpetuating the myths currently about nursing opportunities and very few realistic and honest articles about the reality.

And all those :can't get in anywhere else" 50 k private schools? They are outright lying to get students.

[elkpark]

I agree that I would love to see the proprietary borderline-scam "schools" outlawed. Beyond that, I still think it is the responsibility of the student to make informed choices. No one tells people they can't major in music or philosophy if they want to, because there aren't many jobs available -- I don't see this as any different. A basic aspect of adulthood is that you make choices, and you live with the consequences.

[AutumnDraidean]

Some of those for profit, expensive schools don't have a great rep, which only exacerbates the problem. There are now enough new grads that hospitals can be picky as well. Pharmacy is also experiencing this crash, they're training too many pharmacists.

I wish consumers at large would select away from the for profit schools. They don't seem to care about the quality of the education they provide, the only thing they seem to care about is the $$

[malamud69, BSN, RN]

Interesting...this old argument again...seems to me where I live with the hundreds, perhaps thousands of new students each year that are "churned" out as some would lead you to believe, if the problem was so bad I'd be seeing nurses on the side of the road with signs that might read "New grad will work for food..." Yet, when I talk to the administrators and people I know in the programs most of the new grads have jobs! Wow seems like the hype goes both ways...and as one of the posters mentioned above. It is up to each of us to secure a job...it was like that when I worked during the construction boom and all the way back when I was in high school ...nothing is made easier or harder by a shortage or a glut(remember this is the good ol' USA workers have no real rights anyway so you must take what you can get)...you must jump in with both feet...nothing is handed to you because of your education...get a foot in somewhere and who you know will count! I have been hearing this whining for so long....education is education a job is a job. Quit complaining and go to work.

[HouTx, BSN, MSN, EdD]

Elkpark's message provides the answer - at least for the US. Our Federal government cannot exert this type of control (decrease grad numbers). For one thing, health professions are regulated at the state level, so if such a thing was possible it would have to happen state-by-state. Governments cannot interfere with commerce - that's restraint of trade which is specifically prohibited.

Professions are expected to regulate themselves. This has already happened to some extent with law schools. They have been experiencing a similar situation (too many grads & too few positions) so they mandated that law schools reduce their incoming class sizes. This is possible because law schools are homogenous... all have the same accreditation/approval processes. This is SO NOT the case for nursing. We have waaay too many different types of education & the influx of commercial (investor-owned, for profit) schools has made things even worse. Their primary goal is profit & complying with minimal accreditation requirements so that they can continue to pump out new grads. So the secondary concern is NCLEX pass rates - only because low pass rates threaten accreditation.

IMHO, the number of new grads will not decrease until the public stops buying the myths - that nursing is a safe, secure, well paid job & there are plenty of jobs. Dunno how we can overcome the ongoing hype, especially when the (aforementioned) commercial schools are spending bazillions of dollars on marketing (far more than they use to pay instructors).

[morte, LPN, LVN]

The issue here is control. Nurses don't have any, MDs do, PTs do. Until we do, this is what we will get. Nada.

[AutumnDraidean]

Interesting...this old argument again...seems to me where I live with the hundreds, perhaps thousands of new students each year that are "churned" out as some would lead you to believe, if the problem was so bad I'd be seeing nurses on the side of the road with signs that might read "New grad will work for food..." Yet, when I talk to the administrators and people I know in the programs most of the new grads have jobs! Wow seems like the hype goes both ways...and as one of the posters mentioned above. It is up to each of us to secure a job...it was like that when I worked during the construction boom and all the way back when I was in high school ...nothing is made easier or harder by a shortage or a glut(remember this is the good ol' USA workers have no real rights anyway so you must take what you can get)...you must jump in with both feet...nothing is handed to you because of your education...get a foot in somewhere and who you know will count! I have been hearing this whining for so long....education is education a job is a job. Quit complaining and go to work.

Good grief! This is very harsh.

There are shortages in areas that don't have nursing schools nearby and there are gluts in areas of high population concentrations. Some people can mount a national job search and move where the jobs are, other people just can't. I had some weak career advisement when I went the first time, I was told a historian could do anything, the part they left out? I would have had to move away and I wasn't prepared to do that for personal reasons. I paddled around in circles then I got mad and went back to school!

If someone is sold on rosy promises from a college recruiter while the media is trumpeting nursing shortage but they live in a town with three or four programs? getting a job might not be so easy. even if they get that far...I would like the media to hush about "Nursing shortages" and stop selling nursing as an iron rice bowl. it isn't.

It's a great job if you love it and want to work with people and things medical. It's a versitile starting place. That's all true. It's a tough program and I had to ask myself every day just how bad I wanted it!

[elkpark]

Good grief! This is very harsh.

There are shortages in areas that don't have nursing schools nearby and there are gluts in areas of high population concentrations. Some people can mount a national job search and move where the jobs are, other people just can't. I had some weak career advisement when I went the first time, I was told a historian could do anything, the part they left out? I would have had to move away and I wasn't prepared to do that for personal reasons. I paddled around in circles then I got mad and went back to school!

If someone is sold on rosy promises from a college recruiter while the media is trumpeting nursing shortage but they live in a town with three or four programs? getting a job might not be so easy. even if they get that far...I would like the media to hush about "Nursing shortages" and stop selling nursing as an iron rice bowl. it isn't.

It's a great job if you love it and want to work with people and things medical. It's a versitile starting place. That's all true. It's a tough program and I had to ask myself every day just how bad I wanted it!

This is another issue. I had another career before I went into nursing and can tell you that, for generations, people in many (most?) other fields go to college expecting that they will need to move to where they can get a job when they finish school. Nursing is the only college-level occupation/profession I've ever encountered where large numbers of people routinely expect to be able to go to school and then find employment (not just employment, but their dream job!) without leaving their current location.

[chuckster, ADN, BSN, RN, EMT-B]

While he number of newly graduated nurses has increased significantly over the last decade, laying the blame on the nursing schools for the present nurse oversupply is misplaced. The institutions are responding to the demand for nursing education and while some schools - primarily, but not exclusively the for-profit colleges - have aggressively and perhaps deceptively recruited new nursing students, in most cases, the demand is consumer-driven due to the the media (and to a lesser extent, the BLS).

There have been countless stories in print and in the electronic media that spoke about a severe nursing shortage and framed the nursing profession as as immune to recession. The verbiage about nursing in the BLS information was only slightly less hyperbolic. As a result, greater and greater numbers of students migrated to nursing programs and colleges increased their nursing enrollment in response to this increased demand.

The AMA strictly limits the number of students that can attend medical school in this country through a variety of mechanisms. This artificially limits the number of doctors thus actively encouraging a permanent physician shortage. Unless the ANA is willing to do something similar, nursing employment will always be cyclical, with shortages followed by gluts followed by shortages, etc, etc.

Right now, we are in the glut part of the nursing employment cycle. This will be followed by a shortage, but at some point in the medium to long term - probably too far in the future to help many of the tens of thousands of likely underemployed nursing grads over the next several years.