Lvn to rn, community college or vocational??

Nursing Students LPN-RN

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  1. Which path would you take to become an RN?

    • 1
      Community College. Work while going to class, save money!
    • 0
      Vocational school. Take out loans and pay them off right away, save time!
    • 1
      BOTH. Take some classes at community then transfer to the program.
    • 0
      Neither.

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Do I want to continue my education? YES! The problem is... do I want to continue through community college OR a vocational school (of course it'd be accredited - I'm looking into Unitek and Carrington college.)

I do know that it's a big sacrifice either way, community college would take me longer but cost me less , vocational school will take less time but cost me so much more.

My dilemma is that I went to a vocational LVN school so all the pre-reqs that are required I took through their program in itself. AKA I have absolutely NO G.E. done.

I met with a community college counselor and here is what it would look like going through the CC route:

  • I would apply and have to take my G.E. courses
  • I would have to take the pre-reqs to the pre-reqs that nursing requires. AKA In order to take BIO, I have to take take specific math classes .
  • All in all, she mapped out a course outline for me and it would take me 2 years to complete the nursing 'pre' pre-reqs and then my nursing pre-reqs. (so 2020 would be my projected start date to the RN program IF I get accepted. And then it would take another 2 years to finish the RN program. RN program in my specific CC would require me to also be CNA certified (which is a new thing they added, so that's another $1k or so? I could be wrong I didn't do any research to a CNA program) + not to mention I would have to take all my GE classes in order for me to graduate with my associates degree of nsg.

If I take the Carrington college route:

** They have a pre-reqs program with a science degree so basically I wouldn't have to deal with the waitlisting of trying to get into science classes through CC.

  • All my pre-reqs required to apply into the LVN to RN bridge program would be taken and finished within 16 months
  • 3.0 GPA requirement to be accepted into RN program afterwards
  • Must past TEAS test with a 62-68%? (I wrote it down but forgot to bring my notebook so this is just an estimated number)
  • From there - I start the LVN to RN Bridge program - and can finish within 32 weeks

Pre-req program w/ science degree = estimated $22-33k

LVN to RN bridge program = estimated $32-37k

See my dilemma?

Anyone go through either the CC route or Vocational school route? Please leave ANY and ALL advice.

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Community college route is always the more stable and cost effective decision. Many, if not all, courses taken there will transfer to a public school BSN program, while the proprietary school courses transfer nowhere, unless another for profit school run by the same company.

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Community college route is always the more stable and cost effective decision. Many, if not all, courses taken there will transfer to a public school BSN program, while the proprietary school courses transfer nowhere, unless another for profit school run by the same company.

Thank you, I'm definitely going to take that into consideration.

Also I forgot to mention in my original post, Carringtons pre-req program only allows 50% transfer credits.

I can't remember how she worded it but it was something like their total pre- reqs credits would be 46. And the total you can transfer over from CC is 23, so only half, not sure why their program has a limit to transfer credits but that's something I'll follow up on.

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Essentially all schools have a limit on the number of credits that you can transfer in. They want you to have some kind of investment in them.

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