Bachelors to RN or BSN (not too expensive?)

[clep3705]

There are thousands of people who post here, only a small percentage of whom are nurses. There are hundreds of thousands of nurses who post at allnurses.com, which is the appropriate place to ask nursing school and nursing career questions.

To initially become an RN, it typically takes 4 semesters as a nursing student at a community college granting an ADN degree or 4 semesters at a university granting the BSN degree. While that appears to make them about equivalent in elapsed time, the BSN has more prerequisites. However, is the end goal is a BSN, which should be the end goal, all of the BSN prerequisites will eventually be required. The number of semester hours in a BSN semester may be more than the number of semester hours in an ADN semester.

What really differentiates one nursing program from another are the clinical experiences. If you have a university nursing school and a community college nursing school in the same area, the university students are going to get the best clinical experiences. The biggest and best hospitals don't hire ADNs, so they aren't keen on using their staff resources training them. There are plenty of large hospitals without a single ADN student to be found anywhere. It's very important to find out about the clinical experiences before starting a nursing program. You want the best clinical experiences possible where you can see the most and do the most under the guidance of the best. Getting a BSN after becoming an ADN RN does not provide additional clinical experiences. You want the best clinical experiences from the beginning because one shot is all you get.

Every large hospital has ADNs on staff, even if they don't hire ADNs. ADNs hired decades ago generally aren't required to upgrade to a BSN, although sometimes that does occur.

Working full-time and becoming an RN are incompatible. There's always the one exception found frolicking with the unicorns, but realistically, nursing school is a full-time job taking 16-18 hours per semester and spending 24 hours per week at the hospital. Go to allnurses.com and get a reality check on working while in nursing school.

If the only two options are an expensive, private university for a BSN and a local community college for the ADN, get the ADN and later a BSN. Minimize your debt but look at the bigger picture. If you can chose between a local ADN program and a somewhat more expensive state university for the BSN, get the BSN.

Use this forum for help in completing some of the prerequisites for nursing school. Use allnurses.com for nursing school questions. Get the wisdom of the informed crowd, not the scattered opinions of the small few who may not have even attended nursing school.