It isn’t easy to become a nurse, especially in Monterey. At Monterey Peninsula College, the average time for qualified students to enter the Maurine Church Coburn School of Nursing is about four years. But that may change now that the school is revamping its admissions process – a prospect that will help some candidates, but might hurt others.
Starting in fall 2014, the school will be using a multi-criteria selection process to evaluate applicants. It means prospective students will be judged on a 100-point system comprised of various characteristics – for example, a student with a bachelor’s degree will get five points, and one with a high grade point average in science classes could get 30 points.
The change, according to the nursing school’s director Laura Loop, is prompted by poor retention rates. While MPC aims to graduate 85 percent of its nursing students, the community college hasn’t met that goal in four of the past five years. The average rate, Loop says, has been more around 78 to 80 percent.
“We need to do something to promote our retention so we have good student success [and] good outcomes,” she says.
In effect, the new system will give an upper hand to students with good scores on the multi-criteria assessment. It does away with the old lottery system, in which students who met minimum criteria were randomly selected for admission based on how long they’d been waiting. The school typically has about 140 applicants for 32 spots. Those who didn’t make it had to reapply the next year.
Hartnell College’s nursing school in Salinas, meanwhile, has roughly similar numbers for its residential nurse program, but doesn’t use a wait list.
Making the switch won’t be easy for MPC. Some prospective students are worried about how the assessment will affect their chances. One student, Kevin Downey, says he feels like he’s being put at a disadvantage after years of work.
“I didn’t know they would do the bait and switch,” Downey, 45, says.
Downey, who juggles parenting duties with work as a nursing assistant, says he’s been taking prerequisite classes for a decade in hopes of entering MPC’s nursing school. He even retook an English course, thinking a higher grade would give him better chances. He got an A.
The old system, Loop explains, weighed English heavily. But nursing schools have found that English grades don’t correlate to retention. That’s why MPC – and 28 of California’s 78 community college nursing programs – have switched to multi-criteria assessment.
But Downey is frustrated. He admits he doesn’t have stellar grades, but says he does have a wealth of experience. Downey says he’s been a paramedic for two decades, and previously worked as an ER technician at Community Hospital of the Monterey Peninsula and Natividad Medical Center. Experience, however, only garners five points on the scale.
“Data analysis did not show a significant correlation between length of experience and completion of the program,” Loop says.
Downey is upset that people who’ve been waiting for admission will have no priority in the new process. But Loop says if the school allowed that, it would take four more years to switch systems.