Home

Rep. Hansen Clarke introduces The Student Loan Forgiveness Act of 2012 (HR 4170)

Tread 8, 2012

How, Why, and How to Fix It

Cindy Cassar didn’t get accepted into the Stony Brook University School of Nursing, even though she got straight A’s in all her prerequisites.

So Cassar went back to school for teaching, got certified to give EKGs and draw blood from patients, and applied to the nursing school again three years later only to receive another rejection letter.

“I had a straight A average in all my science and math classes,” said Cassar, a 41-year-old single mother from Huntington Station who attended Suffolk County Community College before applying for nursing school. “I couldn’t believe I couldn’t get into Stony Brook with all I did.”

Cassar is not alone. Nursing schools across the country deny admission to nearly 50,000 qualified students each year at a time when the nursing shortage crisis in the country continues to worsen, according to a recent survey. There are many reasons the nursing shortage exists, but a lack of interest in the profession is not one of them. Nursing schools don’t have the money to hire doctorate-educated faculty to teach nursing at the bedside and even if they could, only one percent of nurses fit that description.

“We’ve had quite a few qualified students we’ve had to turn down,” said Dr. Lee Anne Xippolitos, Interim Dean of the School of Nursing and Chief Nursing Officer of Stony Brook University Medical Center. “The faculty shortage – that’s what the issue is.”

Nursing schools like Stony Brook University’s are forced to turn away hundreds of qualified students looking to become nurses and potentially alleviate the nursing shortage. For the 2009 school year, Stony Brook University received 341 applications for its two-year undergraduate nursing program, according to Xippolitos. Of those, 202 students qualified for the program, but the school only granted admission to 48 students. The 12-month program was just as tough get into, with 432 applicants – 270 of which were qualified – and 64 accepted.

But Cassar was one of the lucky ones. Two days before orientation began for the 2009 school year, Cassar received a phone call from the School of Nursing telling her that she was accepted because the school had received additional High Needs Nursing Funding from the state and was able to admit more students from the alternate list of qualified students. “It was all very fast,” said Cassar, who had planned to attend Molloy College while working during the day as a teacher’s assistant in Rockville Center. “I had very little time to gather my life together.” Without the additional funding, the school of nursing would only have been able to accept 24 students, according to Kathleen Bratby, the Assistant Dean for Students at the Stony Brook University School of Nursing.

The nursing shortage in the country has existed in varying degrees of severity for decades. Hospitals in New York State saw a 7.1 percent vacancy rate for nurses in 2008, up from 6.38% in 2006, according to the Healthcare Association of New York State. The expected annual growth rate for nurses in New York over the next decade is .4 percent, even though there’s an expected eight percent growth in demand to “maintain current levels of patient care,” the HANYS found in May 2009.

Nationally, hospitals experienced an 8.1 percent vacancy rate in 2007, according to the American Hospital Association.

The nursing shortage matters because it directly affects patient care at the bedside and creates a significant healthcare problem in the country. Because there are fewer nurses to care for patients, the workload per nurse increases and reduces the amount of individual attention given to each patient. And it’s likely going to worsen as the shortage persists while the population ages. “In the next decade, many of the nation’s 80 million baby boomers will reach 65 which means that the demand for nursing care will increase for years to come,” according to Peter Buerhaus’ article in the March-April 2005 issue of Nursing Economics.

The problem with nursing education arises in the cost of clinical education, where one professor takes no more than eight students around the hospital for eight hours per week and teaches them at the bedside. “We could take as many people in the classroom that we have seats for,” explained Xippolitos. “But the problem is the clinical hours. Those students now have to take what they’re learning in the classroom into the hospital and you need somebody to supervise them.”

The solution – hiring more clinical faculty to teach students – is easier said than done. Especially since the preference for clinical faculty professors is for them to have a PhD –a position with a starting salary of $85,000. So every student costs the school at least an additional $10,625 more than students in other majors.

Nursing students in the two-year program pay the same tuition and fees as any other undergraduate student – about $3,250 (this IS accurate – you questioned the accuracy on my first draft. I will explain if you’d like) per semester for a New York State resident who does not live on campus. “At the School of Nursing you now need to have one faculty member to every eight students in the clinical,” said Xippolitos. “You can see where you don’t get as much money back and the operation is far more expensive.”

There’s also a shortage of doctorate-level nurses to teach nursing students. Less than one percent of the 3,000,000 nurses in the country have a doctorate degree, according to The American Association of Colleges of Nursing. To help mitigate this shortage, the AACN endorsed a decision in 2004 that mandates all advanced practice nurses to have a Doctor of Nursing Practice degree by 2015, leading to a rise in popularity of DNP degree programs across the country including the one at Stony Brook University.

Stony Brook University doesn’t feel the shortage of DNP faculty as badly as other nursing schools do because of the suburban setting, but in more rural areas, the shortage impacts the ability to each undergraduate students. “In upstate New York you have maybe 28 positions available, but you could have eight vacant lines,” explained Marie Marino, coordinator of the Doctor of Nursing Program at the Stony Brook University School of Nursing. “You cannot find faculty to fill those lines. If your school was to take in 100 undergrads but you have quarter shortage, you have to take fewer students. In our little area here on Long Island, we have the ability to fill all our lines. We have enough DNP faculty, but this is a very unique area across the nation.”

Next month, the first class of DNP students will graduate from Stony Brook University, adding 30 more potential faculty members for nursing schools to hire for clinical instruction. At Stony Brook University, 35 out of the 40 faculty members that teach clinical rounds have a doctorate degree, but that’s not typical. “It’s a recruitment problem that most schools of nursing have,” said Dr. Xippolitos of hiring DNP faculty for clinical instruction.

And the AACN directly relates the shortage of DNP faculty to nursing schools’ inability to train enough nurses to help the shortage. “U.S. nursing schools turned away 49,948 qualified applicants from baccalaureate and graduate nursing programs in 2008 due to insufficient number of faculty, clinical sites, classroom space, clinical preceptors, and budget constraints,” according to AACN’s report on . “Almost two-thirds of the nursing schools responding to the survey pointed to faculty shortages as a reason for not accepting all qualified applicants into their programs.”

President Obama has acknowledged the nursing shortage in speeches about his healthcare reform plan, and has vowed to fix it. “There are a lot of people [in the U.S.] who would love to be in that helping profession, and yet we just aren’t providing the resources to get them trained—that’s something we’ve got to fix,” Obama said at the White House Forum on Health Reform in March 2009. The American Nurses Association formally endorsed Obama in September 2008 based on his promises to improve healthcare. The Obama administration included $500 million from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 to alleviate the shortage of healthcare workers, including nurses.

That money is intended to provide tuition assistance and scholarships to nursing students, fund nursing research, and increase the number of faculty by supporting advanced degree programs. “The Nurse Faculty Loan Program awards grants to schools of nursing that require the school to establish a fund to provide loans for nursing students in advanced degree programs,” according to a June 2009 article by Charles Alexandre and Greer Glazer in the . “Up to 85% of the loan may be forgiven if the nurse is employed as full-time faculty at a school of nursing over a four-year period.”

Education isn’t the only reason the country has a nursing shortage crisis. Mandatory overtime detracts a lot of registered nurses from practicing. Only about 71 percent of registered nurses work full time. “The complexity of the patients requires an enormous amount of stamina, and it takes a lot of energy,” said Marino, who added that many nurses are working mothers. “They’re always seeking continuing education – it’s difficult.” The stress of increased workloads has shown to lead to job dissatisfaction among nurses. A 2002 study in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that “nurses reported greater job dissatisfaction and emotional exhaustion when they were responsible for more patients than they can safely care for.”

So even though the nursing profession is rife with problems, for Cassar, the prospect of being a registered nurse in two years was worth the fight to get into the program. “I am so happy with what’s happened to me,” she said. “It was worth every moment of those sleepless nights.”

Source: The Nursing Shortage: Where It All Begins

Dreamz Solution for Debt Settlement

How it works?

The debt settlement company negotiates on the borrowers’ behalf with creditors to reduce the overall debts in exchange for an agreement upon regular payments to be made. Only credit card debts and other unsecured loans can be handled, not student loans, auto financing or mortgages.

For the debtor, this makes obvious sense – they avoid the stigma and intrusive court-mandated controls of bankruptcy while still lowering, sometimes by more than 50%, their debt balances. Whereas, for the creditor, they regain trust that the borrower intends to pay back what he can of the loans and not file bankruptcy (in which case, the creditor risks losing all monies owed).

In order to work with a debt settlement company, a consumer needs lump sum cash (best scenario), or build up enough funds over pre-determined period of time. Once enough funds are built up the negotiation process can begin with each creditor individually. Accounts can be held by credit card companies or may be sold to collections agency for average of $0.15 on the dollar. The debt settlement company negotiates with the credit card companies for 35% – 50% of the existing balances. The debt settlement companies typically have built up a relationship during their normal business practices with the credit card companies and can come to a settlement agreement quickly. Once the consumer pays the agreed upon amount, the debt settlement companies take a percentage of the savings of the forgiven debt as the fee.

There are obvious drawbacks – credit reports will show evidence of debt settlements and the associated FICO scores will be lowered as a result. There’s always the possibility of lawsuit whenever debts lay unpaid.

Debt settlement , also known as debt arbitration or debt negotiation , is an approach to debt reduction in which the debtor and creditor agree on a reduced balance that will be regarded as payment in full.

Information about Debt Settlement , Personal Debt Settlement, Credit Card Debt Settlement and many more about Debt Settlement and also helping in all types of Debt Settlement Services

Source: Debt Settlement Services