Passaic college president continues push for nursing degrees

A week after a proposal to offer community college bachelor's degrees in New Jersey was dealt a blow by fellow college presidents, the head of Passaic County Community College made his case before state lawmakers.

Passaic and Union County College want to create RN-to-BSN programs to allow existing nurses to receive bachelor's degrees, Steven M. Rose, the Passaic president, told the State Assembly's higher education committee Thursday.

That plan has been vigorously opposed by four-year schools' presidents, which say it is unnecessary and costly. Four-year college presidents also have questioned the community colleges' abilities to attract qualified faculty.

More broadly, many college presidents said they see the two nursing proposals as just the first round of a push to expand community colleges' offerings.

At a vote of the New Jersey Presidents' Council last week, 19 four-year colleges opposed the proposal; 18 presidents voted in favor of it, including the Passaic and Union heads.

"You know, most of the time, this presidents council has worked fairly harmoniously, most of us our votes are unanimous. Most recently, we had a vote that wasn't unanimous," Rose told lawmakers.

Rose spoke before the committee as chair of the Presidents' Council, and his report came amid testimony regarding various higher education issues in the state.

That gave him room to make his case without rebuttal from other colleges, in the first time this issue has formally come before state lawmakers in an official capacity.

One legislator asked why other college presidents had opposed the proposal.

"Well, they said it's unnecessarily duplicative, that's one of the things that is in the statute, that we already have these programs, why do you have to do it?" Rose said. "Their argument is that cost should not be an issue there necessarily, just if we are offering it, these students could go on and do it, we do have the capacity to do it. So you're adding capacity that's not necessary at this point.

"Obviously, we disagree — we kind of believe that it's necessarily duplicative," Rose said, citing a study his school had commissioned that found 80 percent of his nursing graduates said they were unable to afford a bachelor's completion program.

Rose also rejected another argument against the nursing degrees.

"They have also argued that it's unnecessarily expensive for us to do it. That one I do disagree with, the fact is nursing is a very expensive program for us to do," Rose said. "But the expensive part of nursing is the clinical part, where we're in the hospital with the students. We're already doing that part."

The Passaic and Union proposals are currently before the state's Secretary of Higher Education, who does not have a mandatory timeline for a decision.

State lawmakers are not involved in that process but have floated other ideas regarding bachelor's degrees at community colleges; the Senate President has backed a proposal allowing community colleges to confer applied bachelor's degrees.

On other topics, Rose called for an evaluation of New Jersey's "high-tuition, high-aid" model, saying "it may be the time to really take a look at how it is calibrated."

He also promoted the use of prior-learning assessment to offer college credit for nonacademic workplace experience and spoke about the high costs of college textbooks.