Nursing students face rejection

Hundreds of students are bound to be declined entry to the Northern Marianas College School of Nursing, with only 20 slots available at the start of the Fall semester.

There is little chance the number of slots will increase over the next months unless the department gets funding from the administration to hire more instructors, according to department chair Lois Gage.

In an interview, Gage explained that the CNMI Board of Nursing, due to safety issues, requires that the college limit the number of students to 10 per instructor.

The nursing school currently has only five instructors—three handling the 26 students in the first year class and the other two teaching the 16 students in the second year class.

The graduation of the second year students in the summer will free up two instructors. These two will be assigned to teach the incoming students.

“Any nursing program anywhere is a little bit unique in that our students take care of patients. They handle medication, they change dressing, they help patients in and out of bed. This makes us very, very aware of safety. When the students are in a hospital, they need to have an instructor with them to answer their questions and help them. Ten students is the limit each instructor can handle. So in order for us to take more nursing students, we need more instructors,” Gage said.

She said she was aware that hundreds of students want to get into the nursing program at the college. There are at least 100 students currently taking prerequisite courses at NMC in preparation for nursing school, she added.

The department called the attention of the administration to the increased interest in the program as early as December 2003. But no additional funding has yet been given for the improvement of the program, she said.

Each instructor is paid an average annual salary of $35,000.

“The administration here at the college knows and agree that we need more [instructors], but we can’t get more until we have funding from [Capitol] Hill. We need to have actual money in our hand before we can start hiring,” she said. “I can’t believe we’re not getting support. I don’t understand why government officials say they support education and do nothing about it. No money is no support; support is adequate money to run a program.”

Aside from the lack of instructors, the limited capacity of the Commonwealth Health Center is another reason the nursing school cannot accept a large number of students.

“The hospital is small and although they can accommodate more than 20, they certainly can’t handle hundreds of students,” Gage said.

Hence, NMC will have no choice but to decline students come Fall. “It’s sad, but that’s what we’re looking at right now,” she said.

With hundreds of applicants wanting to get in the program, the department is also faced with a problem regarding the process by which to select students.

Unlike its counterparts in the United States and other countries, NMC’s nursing school does not have a selection process in place, according to Gage.

“The way it’s set up right now, unless we come up with a selection process, it will be the first 20 students at the door on registration day. That’s pretty scary; it’s an environment I don’t want to be at. But we are having some meetings with the administration to talk about what we can do,” she said.