Programs that don't care about their students.

Over the past decade we have seen a rise in the need for healthcare professionals, particularly nursing. Programs offering degrees leading to RN certification have seen increased applications across the board. While these nursing programs benefit from the added income of more students and use it to build new facilities or acquire new technologies, it seems that the actual students are often the lowest priority. In addition, due to the nature of the profession many of the teaching faculty do not hold doctoral degrees and/or have no formal training in education - which may be part of the reason the academic structure of some nursing programs are lacking.

Everyone knows nursing is hard, but it seems to have been made more difficult arbitrarily. With many nursing programs reporting a 60%+ failure rate, the students cannot be the only issue. Students in nursing programs report bullying and favoritism by professors more than any other major. I have read numerous accounts on this forum of students being denied due process - being dismissed from a program without explanation or being given a poor grade or clinical review without being given a reason why, etc. I have even witnessed this behavior myself. Additionally there typically are much stricter requirements on nursing students. For instance, a student in another department can typically miss a week of class if they need surgery without issue but in nursing that often leads to expulsion/repeating a course. I know nursing students have clinical that they may miss in that situation but other colleges have internships and placements for on the job experience and still do not typically penalize the student for a medical issue.

The nurse practitioner I see for my "lady checkups" has a daughter that wants to go into nursing when she graduates from high school, and she is encouraging her not to because she believes "nursing schools are too corrupt these days". That wasn't the first time someone working in healthcare has told me that. It seems to me that there should be some way to hold these programs accountable when they take advantage of or mistreat students. Unlike what I have experienced in other programs, nursing programs seem distinctly inclined at evading the truth and eluding action against them. I sincerely hope that the situations many of you have spoken about improve and that the mistreatment of student nurses at those institutions declines. I wouldn't want the next generation of nursing faculty and mentors to show as much disdain for teaching and their students as I have seen in the past few years.