ehan09

Please check out my recent posts on another Bellarmine Accelerated BSN thread. If you have any additional questions, let me know. Do a lot of research and only go to this school/program if it is your only option. You will learn, but the education quality is no better than most of the other nursing schools in the area, their tuition is the highest in the area, and their failure rate is extremely high (probably the highest in the state of Kentucky). I am currently in the May 2016 class set to graduate in May 2017, and we have lost over 50% of the people we started out with (and no, these people were not lazy and will be amazing nurses... they worked their butts off and did everything they could and still failed). Several faculty members pride themselves in weeding people out and most of them will turn their backs on struggling students. Most of us remaining in the program are extremely unhappy and wish we went elsewhere.

PeachyBSN, they absolutely hire Bellarmine graduates, but keep in mind anyone in the Louisville area will hire basically any graduate from any program. When you talk to Bellarmine on the phone and during their orientation/information sessions, they make it seem like their graduates are the most desirable to hire, and some places might agree or favor Bellarmine more because they themselves went there, but you'll find that with absolutely any school. I know student nurses and new graduate nurses who have recently had no problem securing jobs and they are going to JCC, ITT tech, Spalding, UL, Galen and every other nursing school around here too. One of my classmates at Bellarmine was just hired a few weeks ago in the ICU along with 2 other students graduating from UL and Galen. So the Bellarmine name really does not mean much when it comes to securing a job. In this area completing nursing school = job. Even people who are graduating with their ADNs are having no problem getting jobs here even in the more highly sought after units like ICU, ED, Peds and so on. As far as tuition, there is a program I know of called Norton Scholar which will pay part of your tuition as long as you maintain a certain GPA throughout school, and you owe them a certain amount of time after graduation. Most hospitals here are doing student loan payback after you sign on with them, but you will also owe them time in exchange for this. These programs are constantly changing and fluctuating though. I do know that all the programs in the area that help with tuition will pay a maximum of around $25k, and that is less than half of Bellarmine's tuition. A lot of people in my program had to do FAFSA, and a lot of them were not eligible for enough student loans to cover the entire tuition cost so they needed to take out private loans (which is unfortunate because the interest on them is so high). I feel bad because I know of several Bellarmine students who failed out and took out private loans, so they are in a very tough spot.

As someone who is currently in the Bellarmine Accelerated BSN program set to graduate in May of this year, please please do your research before you decide to attend and drop this amount of money on your education. I rarely speak up about things like this, but this is such an expensive school and I really feel obligated to warn people. The Bellarmine Accelerated program is very badly structured which puts so much avoidable intense stress on the students. It is poorly run and there are so many issues that shouldn't be happening. This is unacceptable for a program that has been going on for so many years, especially considering how high the tuition is. The Bellarmine Nursing program directors and even the dean know of all the issues because of the hundreds of complaints and grievances that have been filed by students, and they are aware of how poorly the program is run and will actually admit to it when you are one on one with them; yet all they do is turn their back on the easily fixable issues and the struggling students and they do nothing to help or change for the better. Me and many of my classmates wish we had listened to the warnings from previous students about how difficult it is and how astronomically high the failure rate is. Some of the teachers proudly admit to weeding students out and failing them. Nursing school is hard no matter what, but it does not need to be like this. I have personally been in clinical with nurses went through the program and several of them have told us that they wish they could warn the incoming students. I feel the same way as them and I haven't even finished yet. It is a pretty well known fact that all the Bellarmine Accelerated program cares about is your money, which is why they will admit anyone who meets the bare minimum requirements (in 2016 they actually admitted some people in my class who didn't even meet the minimum requirements). Once they have your money, they mostly stop caring and you will get little to no support from the faculty once you begin. At that point, you are on your own and begin to feel like you are sinking and feeling like you have been set up to fail very early on, and that feeling gets worse and continues for at least 7-8 months. Almost all of us wish we looked at other options and did a different program. You always think it will be different for you... we all did. I have friends who I started out in this program with in May 2016 who had great a great GPA in their undergrad and pre requisite classes and they were dedicated and worked their butts off, and they ended up failing because they became so exhausted or they got stuck with one of the tough teachers and they ended up failing by a tenth of a point. And if you fail one class (even if it is over one question or a scan-tron error), you have to wait almost an entire calendar year until that class is offered again to start back up again and your life is completely on hold for that time. I have made it this far and will probably be fine, but the amount of stress with seeing so many people around me be treated so badly by the faculty and fail out when it's obvious they will make amazing nurses and they've worked their butts off has not been a great experience. It's really upsetting to witness. Your quality of life takes a hit with any accelerated nursing program, but we know people in other accel programs and they are tough, but the programs are more reasonable, they have a life, and they are overall more happy and have a better quality of life. Also what I just mentioned above how if you have bad luck and end up with one of the tough teachers is one of the many other flaws at Bellarmine. You can take the exact same class as someone else in the cohort, but if they have a different teacher, the material and exam difficultly can be drastically different and it may or may not be in your favor. For example, there were over 10 people who failed Med Surg II with a professor in the fall.... these people all worked their hardest, but still ended up failing. But the other students taking the exact same class with a different teacher had much easier exams, a lot of them received an A as their final grade and absolutely no one failed.... and they only had to put in maybe 1/3 of the work the class with the harder teacher did. As far as Bellarmine's reputation, they have a pretty decent one, but it really is not as amazing as they say. There are a lot of other accelerated nursing schools programs in this area that offer a comparable education. Many of us have heard a rumor that Bellarmine's nursing program is currently under review by the Kentucky Board of Nursing and might potentially go on probation in the future because their failure rate is so high and they have received an overwhelming amount of complaints. We are not sure how true this rumor is, but many practicing physicians and RNs in the Louisville area have heard this rumor too. I have been on several new graduate job interviews, and during a few interviews I have even received negative comments from the individual conducting the interview about how they are hesitant to hire Bellarmine Accelerated grads because the program is structured in a way that people are learning so quickly in an abnormal way, and they are not consistently putting out good nurses because of this. If you want any further information, feel free to privately message me. I'll share all that I know and am also happy to give information on other schools in the area offering accelerated BSN degrees around the same price point that are more supportive and their students do not drop like flies like they do at Bellarmine.