We Must Demolish NP Diploma Mills

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What is AANP doing with those programs??? I think we should unite to take an action on such diploma mills.

15 minutes ago, PsychNurse24 said:

And of course even though I attend one of these diploma middle schools, and my daughter just graduated from one,  passed her boards, and has a job offer, they continue to insist the education is horrible. Their opinions are far superior to our direct experience.

The supply side naysayers are losing their minds right now at the idea of this happening haha

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35 minutes ago, PsychNurse24 said:

Don’t care!  Like I said I trust my own direct experience with my diploma mill rather than your anecdotal information.  And I’m so glad you have “articulated the parameters many times”,  Because you are the experts who get to dictate parameters and set your expectations.  I guess I missed the memo that told me that you’re in charge!

At the end of the day, we are the practitioners setting hiring recommendations for our clinics and your school specifically has failed to meet our expectations. So while you don’t care, who’s gonna care when the academic failures catch up and they lose their accreditation?  You might squeak by, but thousands will be caught up, some who are spending years trudging through their “curriculum” wasting thousands of dollars all because they read on an online forum one or two people made it and found a doctor willing to make a quick buck on underwhelming candidates. Some places may not even consider someone with that degree regardless should such a public failure occur. And with the hundreds of other useless degrees Walden offers, they will just pour into those fields who don’t need the heavy bar of NP practice where patients lives could be at risk.  They lose little in the end.

So again, what is your school doing to suggest somehow their school is producing quality candidates?  How long are most of their students going through their program and what’s the actual graduation rate?  How many actually pass boards first or second time?  Because known reputable online and brick and mortar schools make that data public. 

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40 minutes ago, djmatte said:

At the end of the day, we are the practitioners setting hiring recommendations for our clinics and your school specifically has failed to meet our expectations. So while you don’t care, who’s gonna care when the academic failures catch up and they lose their accreditation?  You might squeak by, but thousands will be caught up, some who are spending years trudging through their “curriculum” wasting thousands of dollars all because they read on an online forum one or two people made it and found a doctor willing to make a quick buck on underwhelming candidates. Some places may not even consider someone with that degree regardless should such a public failure occur. And with the hundreds of other useless degrees Walden offers, they will just pour into those fields who don’t need the heavy bar of NP practice where patients lives could be at risk.  They lose little in the end.

So again, what is your school doing to suggest somehow their school is producing quality candidates?  How long are most of their students going through their program and what’s the actual graduation rate?  How many actually pass boards first or second time?  Because known reputable online and brick and mortar schools make that data public. 

They don't look at the degree.  They look at your license, and if you have other skills and there is a need for your skills, they will take you to fill that need.  All hospitals are businesses.  The faster they can get the staff to legally and safely take in patients, the better it is for their bottom line.  FYI, Unitek in CA. Has a bad reputation.  Their NCLEX pass rates are significantly higher than universities with better reputations.  I say that with a degree from a Cal State.  You don't what reasons people had to go to one of these schools you put down, and it's rude considering you're not Bill Gates or Oscar De La Hoya.  You have an attitude bigger than Trump's, and you will never be anywhere near Trump.  You're a run of the mill employee like the rest of us.  However, it is your opinion, and I respect it.  Hope you respect mine.  Savanah Out.  

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5 minutes ago, Ace Savanahh said:

They don't look at the degree.  They look at your license, and if you have other skills and there is a need for your skills, they will take you to fill that need.  All hospitals are businesses.  The faster they can get the staff to legally and safely take in patients, the better it is for their bottom line.  FYI, Unitek in CA. Has a bad reputation.  Their NCLEX pass rates are significantly higher than universities with better reputations.  I say that with a degree from a Cal State.  You don't what reasons people had to go to one of these schools you put down, and it's rude considering you're not Bill Gates or Oscar De La Hoya.  You have an attitude bigger than Trump's, and you will never be anywhere near Trump.  You're a run of the mill employee like the rest of us.  However, it is your opinion, and I respect it.  Hope you respect mine.  Savanah Out.  

We do look at the degree. I certainly have had that input at my clinic. As noted, many recruiters pass over those degrees out of hand. That’s not an oddity or even an exception. But as I stated, we don’t even know the Walden or Phoenix pass rate of either their degree or boards. Because they don’t make that data public. Hospital nursing is vastly different that clinical nurse practitioner work. They have set training and check offs that nurses go through on top of their ability to decide whether to hold or give that Prilosec  with their food or an hour prior.  As an NP, you are often expected to practice at the level of an MD as soon as you are credentialed. A few give you some lead time, but many don’t.  Most of us understand the boards as a whole are a bare minimum of entry and pale in comparison to our MD colleagues experience or knowledge base. So we hold the schools to put their best foot forward to ensure a quality graduate. Few people get that impression from the Walden or Phoenix graduates we’ve encountered. 

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7 hours ago, Ace Savanahh said:

They don't look at the degree.  They look at your license, and if you have other skills and there is a need for your skills, they will take you to fill that need. 

I think license and certification is only viewed up to a certain point that it will fit the writers given narrative, and once reached, it is dismissed for exactly what it is, an entry level requirements. Aim to not let emotion cloud your judgement on this thread. While there is about 5-6 naysayers here, there are many more that know, through real world experience, the caliber of critical thinking that exists in many nurses that go on to “prestigious” 90k a year programs. Some on this forum act is if they are the sole purveyors of reason, logic, and perception of literally every MD and NP out there, and do so with complete lack of evidence.

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34 minutes ago, Shamrock1145 said:

I think license and certification is only viewed up to a certain point that it will fit the writers given narrative, and once reached, it is dismissed for exactly what it is, an entry level requirements. Aim to not let emotion cloud your judgement on this thread. While there is about 5-6 naysayers here, there are many more that know, through real world experience, the caliber of critical thinking that exists in many nurses that go on to “prestigious” 90k a year programs. Some on this forum act is if they are the sole purveyors of reason, logic, and perception of literally every MD and NP out there, and do so with complete lack of evidence.

Please note nobody here is considering “prestige” or cost of a school in our argument and inferring some sort of superior education.  Brick and mortar or online programs who demonstrate consistent good outcomes and are publicly showing that data reinforces the quality of their programs. From a cost perspective, even there DOJ is investigating Walden for practices that have brought down similar schools because their costs are exceptionally high for what many are claiming is a poor curriculum.  
 

My original RN cost me 6800/ year at a small state school and had a phenomenal nursing program recognized throughout the state. My NP Program was mostly online but had significant back end support for clinical rotations. We had regional faculty who’s sole job was to evaluate every site before, during, and after to make sure the location was appropriate for the material and our progression meet their standards. No “just sign the sheet” garbage.  We had specific requirements and minimums during rotations to meet in terms of types of patients and actual procedures we needed to know/perform.  Lectures were live for every class with recordings available and they embraced multiple modes of learning to ensure students had more to reinforce things than just reading a text and writing papers. They had a rigorous exam policy where you needed an 80% minimum on exams to pass before any other work is even considered.  They embraced tight controls on exams with secure browsers and exam  proctors well before most others. They make their numbers public to include graduation levels and board pass rates. These are my opinion of what makes a strong online program and are benchmarks I and many other providers have not seen for profit schools meet. 

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12 minutes ago, djmatte said:

...DOJ is investigating Walden for practices that have brought down similar schools because their costs are exceptionally high for what many are claiming is a poor curriculum. 

In the absence of action by national organizations, certifying bodies, it would appear that the school in question is being held accountable....

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1 minute ago, Shamrock1145 said:

In the absence of action by national organizations, certifying bodies, it would appear that the school in question is being held accountable....

Meanwhile students are still actively being accepted into the disputed programs and current students (probably for fear of their own prospects should the school be sanctioned) are vocally decrying anyone who diminishes the quality of their education. I tend to agree the market flashes itself out, but with the total numbers of acceptance these schools do, it will likely have a larger impact on our field before people wake up. The numbers aren’t sustainable. 

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9 minutes ago, djmatte said:

Meanwhile students are still actively being accepted into the disputed programs and current students (probably for fear of their own prospects should the school be sanctioned) are vocally decrying anyone who diminishes the quality of their education. I tend to agree the market flashes itself out, but with the total numbers of acceptance these schools do, it will likely have a larger impact on our field before people wake up. The numbers aren’t sustainable. 

The current system is not sustainable. I am all for standardization. But the idea of limiting entry to otherwise viable candidates, is not something I wish to entertain.

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Specializes in Psychiatry.
35 minutes ago, Shamrock1145 said:

The current system is not sustainable. I am all for standardization. But the idea of limiting entry to otherwise viable candidates, is not something I wish to entertain.

The problem is they aren't always "viable" candidates. Walden and other for profit programs don't really have any entry requirements other than access to loan money so we don't know if the people they accept are viable or not.

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37 minutes ago, Shamrock1145 said:

The current system is not sustainable. I am all for standardization. But the idea of limiting entry to otherwise viable candidates, is not something I wish to entertain.

Sustainable by what standards? Because by Walden standards, your ability to write a check or put yourself into significant debt is the only entry requirement.  Even if we remove barriers of entry, the curriculum would need to be rigorous. And you still have a school taking money for people who may never make it through such a program. That’s not sustainable by any standards and increases waste as people who might be unqualified for a role waste years on something they think they should be pursuing.  
 

Barriers of entry do set up circumstances that that keep intake and output at acceptable levels where certain academic standards can be maintained. My school has a 3.0 entry requirement. If you can’t do that, they give you the option of hitting a certain score on the GRE. To me, these are acceptable options for starting masters level coursework. It also gives you flexibility should your previous years of school showed less strength. 

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Specializes in Psychiatry.

Look, here's the bottom line. The for-profit programs are an embarrassment. They are well known to be the bottom of the barrel schools. They mainly exist as a way to make money for the investors, and they spend large sums of money on recruitment and marketing and sales tactics as opposed to research. They've proliferated like crazy and struck gold in the world of nursing. Other professions ban them entirely (there is no such thing as a for profit MD program) and yet nurses not only flock to them, they promote them and defend them as equal to not for profit programs. Do an internet search for "for profit college" and look at the ENDLESS articles talking about how many students have been defrauded. Look at how many programs have simply up and vanished once the numbers no longer make sense, or they finally get sued. Walden University is currently under investigation for their nursing program and there has been no update, it may end up closing that program for all we know!

 

https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaeltnietzel/2021/03/08/a-new-report-reveals-the-false-promises-of-for-profit-colleges/?sh=1ab9cddb35fc

 

A new classification of higher education institutions shows that when grouped by their net price and the percentage of their students who were subsequently repaying student loans, for-profit four-year colleges were the worst-performing institutions—by a lot.

The study, “Paying More for Less? A New Classification System to Prioritize Outcomes in Higher Education,” was conducted by Justin Ortagus of the University of Florida and Rodney Hughes of West Virginia University for Third Way, the left-center D.C think tank.

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The researchers examined one variable that might account for the pattern - how much schools spend on instruction per FTE student. What they found was that instead of spending average or higher amounts on instruction, for-profit institutions spend a larger share of their resources on advertising. According to the report, “For-profit institutions account for roughly 40% of all spending on higher education advertising despite enrolling only about 6% of college students.” Many for-profits were among the schools spending the lowest on instruction per FTE student.

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For example, the authors found that the proportion of students completing their certificate or degree differed greatly depending on their background characteristics and the type of institution they attended. The six-year graduation rate for Black students entering higher education in fall 2012 was 42.9% at public four-year universities and 45.5% at private non-profit four-year universities. It was only 14.2% at for-profit four-year institutions.

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