Ten new students to Belmont’s School of Nursing this Spring semester have been selected to receive a $10,000 New Careers in Nursing scholarship, funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The New Careers in Nursing is a program designed to help alleviate the nursing shortage and increase diversity within the profession’s workforce. The scholarship program is designed for college graduates with non-nursing degrees to pursue a second bachelor’s degree like the accelerated nursing program at Belmont. The $100,000 grant helped Belmont’s School of Nursing increase student enrollment with a new spring cohort while expanding program admission from fall semester only to both fall and spring semesters.
Award preference is given to students from groups underrepresented in nursing or from disadvantaged backgrounds. Of the accelerated students beginning their program of study in January 2010, 23 percent are male, and 33 percent come from diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds. In comparison, national nursing workforce data indicate that men comprise only 5.8 percent of the American nursing workforce and racial/ethnic minorities comprise only 10.7 percent. Grant funding will be used by schools to help leverage support for new faculty resources and provide mentoring and leadership development resources to ensure successful program completion by scholarship recipients.