Men and nursing school admission

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Do men have an easier time getting accepted to nursing school since it's a female dominated field? My husband will be applying in the spring, and his grades are low for some of the schools he's considering. I'm just wondering if being male may help. Thanks!

Specializes in LTC.

I dont know where you are from but I just finished lpn school in December and if you are a male you will get in faster because there is a big need for them they have the upper body strength that females just dont have and my instructor told us that men can write there own ticket for the most part. good luck

What do you mean by "write their own ticket"? How?

Specializes in midwifery, ophthalmics, general practice.
I dont know where you are from but I just finished lpn school in December and if you are a male you will get in faster because there is a big need for them they have the upper body strength that females just dont have and my instructor told us that men can write there own ticket for the most part. good luck

you reckon???? most nurses I know- be they female or male have good upper body strength.. at least my generation does! I'm from the days whe we had to lift patients and I can lift as much as most men..

dont know about the states.. but over here, nurses dont lift any more so upper body strength is irrelevant unless you are trying to restain patients.. do you do that much??

now i have this picture in my head of guys built like body builders applying ot be nurses...:chuckle

Specializes in Telemetry & PCU.

The use of gender bias in admissions to any educational institution is against the law. Nursing schools accept students who have met the prereqs and then they go on the waiting list. Bottom line is: getting into NS has nothing to do with your sex.

Specializes in LTC.

I replied to a question regarding men getting into nursing school being easier the reply I made came from an instructors mouth I was just passing it along I absolutly do not agree I think if you qualify you should get in and if you dont then correct the problem and reapply sorry if I offended anyone

Specializes in ICU.

I will be starting nursing school in the Fall of 09 (doing pre-req's right now). I was told I would have no problem getting in because of my grades and my ACT score.

My Daughter-in-law went through this same school some years ago, and she said that the head instructor (who is male) showed a definate preference toward the males that were in the program. I would think that I would get into the program regardless of my gender based upon academics, but who knows. I would guess that there may tend to be some bias toward either sex depending on the person making the decision. In the school I am attending it seems that more females get turned away from the program. Considering that a lot more females apply that is understandable.

Your husband should just concentrate on improving his grades and try to get in. Our school doesn't end up rejecting a lot, because they tend to weed themselves out. You have a year of pre-requisites to get out of the way, and you have to become a CNA before you enter school. From what I have seen probably half of the people who come out of high school and say they want to be nurses drop that idea before the first year is over.

Good luck to your husband.

Specializes in MPCU.

I do not believe that gender makes a difference for admissions to any nursing school. However, my school made a point of stating that no advantage would be given to a candidate based upon gender. I personally would not want to attend a school with that type of bias. Giving an advantage to those with better grades or related experience is another matter.

In my state, I go to a public community college and neither race nor gender is used as part of the admissions process.

However, our school does receive scholarship opportunities that do have preference for males and minorities

Specializes in Emergency.
you reckon???? most nurses I know- be they female or male have good upper body strength.. at least my generation does! I'm from the days whe we had to lift patients and I can lift as much as most men..

dont know about the states.. but over here, nurses dont lift any more so upper body strength is irrelevant unless you are trying to restain patients.. do you do that much??

now i have this picture in my head of guys built like body builders applying ot be nurses...:chuckle

i am a body builder, no i am not huge or anything, but ive got 2 more years of solid lifting to do before I am an RN :)

In my state, I go to a public community college and neither race nor gender is used as part of the admissions process.

However, our school does receive scholarship opportunities that do have preference for males and minorities

That is not true, on the contrary I have been treated otherwise, I was in this school where only students on one color were performing badly, then I was chucked out. I later found out that on the tests there is more than one correct answer and the Instructor cherry picks which answer will help those she would likes pass the exam!

Forgive me but I am going to be a real jerk in this article, however continue reading and you might find this to be interesting.

Some two years ago I developed this strange feeling to help people. I came to the US about three years ago. I have a degree in Business and solid career back ground of about 25 years. After coming to this country I had a problem finding career fit within my profession and so I considered a change, after talking to a few friend , I was advised that a Post Baccalaureate degree program would be the best fit for me. I scouted around and reviewed some of them I discovered this program that looked great, - The program was described as a four year program beginning with 2 Pre-certification and two post certification years in which one would graduate as a Nurse Practitioner.

Anyway, I went about acquiring my pre-reqs with gusto and applied to the program, soon enough I was the proud recipient of an admission letter with instructions on the all sorts of immunizations and vaccinations that I was supposed to take.

The program of course required me to resign my "small" job which I had held on to for 2 years , most nursing programs are full time anyway , there was no chance of me retaining this job while in school.

I was hardly prepared for what I was to expect , but soon enough details begun to emerge after I had taken all the heavy decisions, resigning my job, etc, that infact what what had been presented to me when I was looking for the information on the school's website had changed, the program was no longer a 4 year program but had been shortened to 15 months and called "accelerated" a buzz word used by all nursing schools that matter these days . After I joined the program I was hit with a massive load of information. I begun to take in a few additional observations one of which was appeared to be very few males in the Nursing field as a whole. ( others to follow) . Instructors rushed through the materials without seeming to fully understand it themselves and when one asked for explanations these instructors appeared to lose their temper.

Then there was this instructor who kept insisting that I have a communication problem, I can not illustrate this here but : I where come from we learn English all the way from Kindergarten, so for any one to actually ask "When did you learn English ?" is an insult! I have lived in other English speaking countries before coming to the USA-United Kingdom , no one ever took the liberty to ask me questions like that, but surprisingly, this is the only country I have been where people had problems with my communication .( This instructor did not ask me when I learned English but however assessed me and failed me on my clinical with communication being one of the reasons - An assessment I considered unfair)

Any way , my experience at this school turned out not as I expected, I was discontinued after one semester.

I still have questions though

1) No one seems to consider the fact that I made several major sacrifices to join the program , I resigned my job and I am now unemployed.

2) I should have have been advised and been educated that it was possible to be kicked out( infact the threshold is quite low

3) I have taken on a massive unnecessary school loan which I will now have to pay in spite of the fact that I did not achieve what I intended to .

4) My assessment was unfair , I seem to have been cleverly and skillfully been short changed , but with keen record work being kept , I can never win the case anyway

5) Strangely enough , only minority students seemed to be performing poorly in this program

6) I was ostracized, whenever I sought help , members of my class were not allowed to cooperate with me .

7) Apparently I did not know that there is a certain amount of boot licking apart from the butt washing done during the clinical rounds that students have to do to perform well in school.

8) I also discovered that the pass fail decision for the clinical component is far from being objective and academic and might depend on other things like being liked by other team members.

9) Instructors never kept their promises , they told us to concentrate in certain areas and then cynically set exams without any questions from those areas

10) I have come to believe that Nursing is not an exact science, its a cross between being an art and a science , as such there is no precise and objective way of going about doing anything , it depends on who is doing it and who told you to do it.

11) Strangely , there were no professors with PHDs in this Nursing school which is part of a leading medical school in my state , at the community college where I took my pre-requisites , the I had assistant professors with PHDs and with several years of teaching experience together with research work, in my country, professors can only keep their jobs if they publish new findings regularly.

12) Instructors kept bringing out comments about who "real men" were, I wondered what this had to do with academic performance in the school

13) A pass/Fail decision is left in the hands of one person , there is no committee and neither are any efforts made to re-mediate a failing student, I took the liberty to find out out whether the same happens in Medical school, this is not the case, on the contrary Medical schools have a long drawn out systems comprised of professionals who decide to terminate students after exhausting all machinery aimed at helping the student to improve.

15) These Instructors were not confident about student assessment of their performance and instead of passing out sheets in which the students would evaluate their performance without having to state their names, actually send us to a website where we would have to sign in in order to evaluate performance, how then could one give a negative evaluation of an instructor's performance?

16) I am of the belief that the nursing shortage is actually fake , I think there are people out there willing to be nurses but are being deliberately kept away by this sort of behavior, the creation of false barriers to entry into the profession.

17) Whenever a "science" is easy enough to understand , the practitioners go out o f their way to theorize it and complicate it further. Nursing is not Rocket science, why has it been made to look like that?

18 ) Have gone back to my community college to catch up with my Physics and Chemistry, I believe the world is too big for me to try to get into one corner only.

19) I have rumors that this bad stuff does not end in Nursing school, its "a dog eat dog" society in the field!

20) To my fellow men ! woe betide you , you have to develop a very strong underbelly to float in this proffesion!

If you are looking for fairness cast your net further a field!

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