Home

Does anyone know of any student loans for nursing students?

Jun 29, 2010 by Hazel | Posted in Financial Aid

My shelter can not pay my tuition more. I am currently in a BSN program and the need to find a way to continue without a co signer.

Student loans are not specific major. The federal loans are awarded after completing the FAFSA. But it is out of private loans, which require a co-signer or credit arranged.

Nursing contact means hospital to repay student loans?

Jan 19, 2009 by Melissa83 | Posted in Health Care

I am a nursing student and am knee arcane already in student loans. I was told that if you sign a two year contact with a hospital that they will repay your student loans.

Is this true? Is there a maximum amount they will reciprocate if

It purposes depends on the hospital and their signing bonuses. Maybe there are hospitals offering this as a part of a package impetus, but I've never worked for one. But, many of them offer some sort of sign-on bonus, which you could put toward your loans.

Obama's Civilian Army is now LAW and is Funded

Workforce Sec. 5201. Federally supported student accommodation funds. Sec. 5202. Nursing student loan program. Sec. 5203. Salubrity care workforce loan ...

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

Trend Forecast: The College Bubble Will Burst

With college now being a “right” and the government dishing out loans to cover all the costs, we see the college degree become irrelevant in a new America. We are going see a commercial real estate collapse of the college establishment nationwide. Does the cost of college really out weight the benefit? The answer to that question is NO, one thousand times over. Here is why: Those in college at this moment are utterly throwing precious time and taking very serious risks incurring massive debt. Your degree will not be worth the paper it is printed on in the very near future, prepare to accept any job you have the opportunity for. Most will be working the equivalent as a gas station attendant. Forecasts follow: * Average tuition at four-year public colleges in the U.S. climbed 6.5 percent, or $429, to $7,020 this fall as schools apologetically passed on much of their own financial problems, according to an annual report from the College Board, released Tuesday. At private colleges, tuition rose 4.4 percent, or $1,096, to $26,273. (Huffington Post Oct 2009) The straw man argument typical consists of “Well, if Government didn’t provide loans, no one would be able to afford college”. Again, we simply fall back to the free market model to demonstrate the fallacy in that claim. For if the government were to exit the student aid market, enrollment would fall through the floor. Students who were unable to attend college in the first place, without Government aid, would not enroll forcing pressure on the Universities to bring down costs to meet demand. The free market would also increase the quality of education. With unlimited room for fiscal expansion, Universities have no incentive to pump capital into increasing educational standards. This could include: Teacher Pension Elimination, Reward by result, Textbook and equipment standards increase. Many Universities selfishly will use extra revenue to beauty up the campus or bloat teacher salaries (without the force of incentive). *Private Universities rely much more heavily on private funding than do their public counterpart. As wage disparity increases, real income falls, the standard of living and purchasing power decreases… So too will the investment revenue. Unable to compete with a Public (Government) University that prints money, private Universities will be forced to raise costs to unsustainable price levels. Many private Universities will close doors forever nationwide! One must also not ignore the social implications the college bubble will have in our society. The government has once again broken the firewalls of the Constitution to make attending college a “right”. One must question the weight a college degree will have in a future job market. Will the college degree hold the stature a high school degree once held? We must also return to the fundamental question, “Does the cost of college really out weight the benefit?” The long term fiscal health of the United States receives a grade of an F-^1,000,000 (to the one-millionth power). We are in beginning stages of our greatest depression. Soon unemployment rates will top Great Depression level highs of 25% . Jobs currently lost are never returning. We are at the perspicuous of a currency crisis that will happen sometime in the very near future; this will change the structural status of the United States for the long-term. (Please read my last column on an in-depth analysis on this specific issue). During the next decade we are going to see the University and the institution of College virtually extinct. A few will remain in the long-run, but most will not attend other than the very wealthy elite. Instead of a liberal arts curriculum, young people nation wide will learn marketable skills such as farming/agriculture, animal raising, craft (Basket Weaving, Sewing), steelwork, construction. Amongst other things. This will be called the Second Industrial Revolution, as America’s future economy will depend heavily on export with the chief export being agricultural goods. We are going to see a new establishment of trade schools nationwide. These “schools” will specialize in the marketable skill areas mentioned above. Those who choose to diversify their skill portfolio will have the greatest employment opportunity as we see a shift from the (PhD, MS, MBA, BA, etc) to (Intensive Pastoral Farming, Shifting Cultivation, Dairy Farming, Plantation or Tree Farming, Woodcraft and interior construction, etc) Personal Health management will also be a big trend in the coming years as the medical establishment erodes and drastic rationing takes foot. We are going to see the return of home doctor visits and a significant increase in hospice type care. The nursing field will increase dramatically as the market will demand such an increase. Nutritional, natural herbalist and other fields of the sort will also take a strong foothold as the level of access to the advanced pharmacology we enjoy today, ceases to exist.

Source: Conservative Daily Blog