In Health Profession, College Is Bottleneck

Anon 6:10

You think the answer to having too many applicants is to weed out everyone but the rich kids? Why don’t we raise med school tuition to 100k per year. Then maybe there will be the same number of applicants as there are spots. So what if the students are incompetent, at least they’ll be from rich families.

You can only increase the number of spots if you have the professors to teach them. When I applied to nursing school I was one of over 800 applicants. I got one of 20 slots in a fast track nursing program. I went in with a 4.0 grade point average, I’m no dummy. Competition these days for nursing school is a lot different than in years past. The problem at my school was that they did not have enough professors. There were a lot of intelligent, capable people who were turned away.

The nursing shortage is not going to change, no matter how many applicants you have, until there are enough professors to teach them. The next issue is keeping the nurses that you have. I remember reading a study (I can’t remember the reference) that stated 70% of new nurses change jobs 3 times the first year. THAT’S a problem. We need to do a better job of ensuring new nurses are supported and not thrown to the wolves.