From Orlando Sentinel:
Maxwell: Florida needs to clean up failing, for-profit nursing schools
Florida has long been known as the land of schemes and scams — a place where swindlers eager to separate citizens from their hard-earned money could peddle everything from worthless swampland to overpriced timeshares. The government would just look the other way.
In recent years, though, Florida lawmakers have valiantly tried to crack down on for-profit nursing schools that, if they aren’t scams, are proven failures with as few as 13% of their tuition-paying grads able to pass the national nursing exam.
That crackdown makes sense, right? This state, after all, desperately needs qualified health care workers. Yet nursing school grads who can’t pass their licensing exam don’t help address that. Plus, I don’t think any of us wants to learn that the person trying to decide which medicine gets injected into our arm learned his or her trade at a nursing school where 87% of the grads were failures.
Unfortunately, state legislators who united in near-unanimous, bipartisan fashion to crack down on disreputable nursing programs, have run into an obstacle — namely Gov. Ron DeSantis.
The governor vetoed the attempt last year to crack down on failing nursing schools, describing the measure as “bureaucratic overreach.”
Overreach? When we’re talking about nursing schools “graduating” students who are wholly unqualified to nurse, I think most citizens — and prospective patients — would say: Reach away!
Nurses are traditionally considered one of the most trusted professions in America. And historically, Florida offered solid nursing schools. But on the heels of a deregulation effort in Florida in 2009, the number of respectable university- and college-run programs became dwarfed by the number of small, private for-profit schools that do a quantifiably cruddier job.
From 2020 to 2024, barely half the first-time, test-taking grads from these private, for-profit operations passed the nursing exam — 57% compared to 86% at the state’s public schools. That not only leaves the state short-changed on needed nurses, but also leaves aspiring health care workers with nothing to show for thousands of dollars they spent chasing a career dream.
That’s an obvious problem, which is why the Florida House voted last month 107-to-1 in favor of some basic reforms, including allowing state health officials to make surprise visits to the schools and requiring any school incapable of getting just 30% of its grads to pass the national exam to reimburse tuition.
Do you know how rare it is to get Florida legislators to vote 107-to-1 on anything? Heck, these folks can’t agree that water is wet. Yet in this case, virtually every politician agreed that failing nursing schools aren’t good for the state, because … well … duh.
(The one dissenting House vote came from Seminole County Republican Rep. Rachel Saunders Plakon, who didn’t offer an explanation.)
Like many things in life, Florida’s mess was paved partially with decent intentions. Back in 2009, lawmakers realized Florida needed more health care workers. But they decided to try to make that happen in a very Florida way — on the cheap.
Instead of investing serious money in schools that would produce more nurses, the state decided to lower the barriers for setting up a school so that any Florence-come-lately could throw up a shingle in a strip mall or office park and claim they were a nursing school. The results were predictably ugly.
As a recent investigation by the Orlando Sentinel’s Annie Martin showed, hundreds of new nursing programs quickly popped up — many establishing abysmal track records.
One South Florida nursing program, the Ideal Professional Institute, saw only 13% of its graduates pass the National Council Licensure Exam (NCLEX) — compared to 90% pass rate nationwide.
That school ultimately got shut down with the feds later accusing a school leader of selling fake degrees. But there are plenty of other schools with sorry pass rates, including here in Central Florida. Think about how bad some for-profit programs have to be for the statewide pass rate to be an “average” of 57%.
You’d like to think this would be a top priority for the state’s top health care officials. Unfortunately, Florida’s surgeon general has spent more time attacking vaccines than fly-by-night nursing programs.
To the state’s credit, some legitimate efforts have been made to bolster the number of qualified nurses working in Florida. The governor’s office has calculated that the state has invested $485 million in nursing education programs over the last four years. While that’s only about 0.1% of the state budget over the same time — and less money than the state spent on “emergency” immigration issues, such as “Alligator Alcatraz” last year alone — it’s still a solid investment.
Florida should continue on that path, expanding existing nursing programs at places like Seminole State College and Florida Atlantic University and creating more reputable programs elsewhere.
But the state must couple its investment in legitimate schools with efforts to crack down on the less-legitimate ones.
That’s what legislators from both parties united to try to do last year and what they’re trying to do again this year with House Bill 121.
That bill deserves to be passed and signed into law. Because nursing schools that churn out far more failing graduates than ones who can actually practice aren’t good for anyone — except those cashing the tuition checks.
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