When Parents Choose the Major

By Rose O. Sherman, EdD, RN, NEA-BC, FAAN

For months, nurse leaders have told me that many new graduates are entering nursing but seem to lack the calling and purpose to do the work. One leader recently related the following story when one of her young staff came to her and told her she was leaving nursing.

So one of my young nurses came to me after finishing her residency program and told me she planned to resign and leave nursing. This was devastating to me because I believed she had great potential. Of course, I tried to coach her and asked her what brought her into nursing in the first place. Her answer surprised me. She told me that the idea to enter college to pursue her BSN was her parent’s idea and not her own. They wanted to be sure she could make a living and told her there would always be a job in nursing. The problem was that she didn’t like the work and could not see herself doing this for the rest of her career. She was directly admitted to a BSN program right out of high school and had never worked. She had no exposure to the profession and was not passionate about it. 

After hearing this from leaders, I was not surprised to hear faculty raise this issue during a development session I did at AACN last week. They saw this same trend in their classrooms, with young students in generic BSN programs admitted right from high school into BSN programs. One faculty member observed that the parents seemed more interested in the nursing program during orientation than their children. Others had students tell them that their parents had selected their major and had done the due diligence on how to apply for programs. These faculty noted that while these students were very bright – they had not considered other options. Some even delay taking NCLEX to avoid entry into the profession. This behavior did not occur with accelerated degree students who had entered nursing as a second career with clear goals.

This dilemma is a downstream problem from an upstream trend in nursing programs that began across the country almost a decade ago. Historically, students entered universities and did not have to declare a major until their junior year. They then competitively applied for some majors like nursing, which were limited access programs. Nursing programs received large numbers of highly qualified and motivated applicants. An admission interview was routinely done. The challenge for students attending universities is that if they were not admitted to the nursing program, they either had to transfer to another school or pick another major. This sometimes impacted performance metrics at universities, including the percentage of students who entered the school and graduated. College administrators see direct admit programs as a way to recruit students with high GPAs by giving them a guaranteed slot in a program and ensuring they pay four years of tuition.

The freshman direct admission programs have been targeted at high school students with high GPAs. The admission process rarely involves an interview, and most schools over-admit on their numbers with the anticipation that a certain percentage will either fail out or drop out before entering the core nursing classes. Many schools now have these programs and don’t offer the option of entering nursing in your junior year. After a few years in college, students who explore and decide to be a nurse often have to finish in another major and transition to an accelerated program. Others who attend community college don’t have the option of transferring in with nursing as their major.

As a faculty member, I had concerns when this program was introduced. Some entering freshmen were very smart but immature and unsure about what direction to take in their lives. Others had “snowplow parents” used to driving the decision-making for their kids and removing all obstacles. Not surprisingly, some decided that nursing was not for them but finished in the major.

New practices and policies often have unintended consequences. Part of the turnover trends we see with recent graduates may be an outcome of entering a profession where you must love it to do it – especially today. Before we do any moon shots to ramp up admissions to our programs rapidly – I think it is important to re-examine our admission processes and the due diligence students are doing (or not doing) before they choose nursing as a major.