Penn State College of Nursing BSN Program

I am a current Penn State Nursing student in my Senior year. I’ve noticed some people have questions about the Penn State Nursing program and it seems to be a little difficult to navigate the discussion page to find the answers they’re looking for. I would be happy to answer any questions you have about Penn State or the Nursing program. Ask me anything!

Would you mind sharing your high school stats? Also, how many people are typically admitted to the freshman class? Thanks!

@sophia02 I can actually answer the admission question. There are usually around 1800 applicants and Penn State has around 150 spots (this puts it at a less than 10% acceptance rate). However, they do end up accepting a few dozen more because they know that some people will drop out.

@sophia02 , now JD is in the program now. Loves it, but wow does it require a lot of work. It’s like regular college plus a part-time job when you factor in clinicals. Heavy, heavy critical thinking and more memorization than I could handle. Kudos to all who get in. Good luck. It’s an amazing program.

Thank you so much! I actually found out that I got into nursing at university park yesterday! Super excited because it was a reach for me but still trying to figure out the financial stuff. How many people are out of state, and are there any nursing specific scholarship opportunities?

@sophia02, I would just research online. PSU isn’t known for giving out a lot of merit or financial aid. There are a few scholarships at the college level, but those tend to be handed out to current students.

Yeah, I haven’t been able to find many financial aid opportunities. I saw one article about a nursing scholarship but haven’t seen any other information on it. I’m going to try my best to figure it out since I really like Penn State, but I can always go in state.

Hi I was wondering if you think I have a chance of getting accepted. I personally don’t think so but I just want to ask someone who is actually a student in the program.
I am heavy on STEM classes-
I took honors chemistry, honors biology, Ap physics 1, molecular genetics (2 period class), and I am currently taking anatomy and physiology this year. I am taking ap comp sci this year and I am planning to take the Ap exam. I also haven’t gotten a semester C for my math classes all of high school so far. I am taking calculus this year. My gpa is pretty low since I took many honors and Ap classes (I never got any C for semester grades though). By the end of this school year, I will have taken 10 honors classes and 5 ap classes. My gpa is 3.59 and my weighted is 4.24. My SAT is very low (1190). I also did a lot of SSL hours helping out at this elderly home place. My sister just graduated from penn state this year. I am one of the leaders in charge of a school club my friend has started. I also have other classes other than stem classes that I think may look good on my transcript. I did orchestra all 3 years and Spanish for 6 years (I am taking Ap spanish this year). I am a teacher aid for a bio class for the first semester and I will be a teacher aid for a molecular genetics class for second semester. I know my sat score will definitely bring me down, but I am hopeful my classes can give me a slight chance and also applying early action with a sister who is a very recent alumni. Sorry for having such a long comment. Didn’t expect this to be so long lmao

@sophia02 Sorry I am not getting back this until now, but here goes. I would say there are about 15-30% or more of out of state students in each yearly class, but that’s just a rough estimate. Most of the students are in-state students but there is a fair number of people from across the US. In terms of financial aid, Penn State doesn’t give out a lot of aid. There are scholarships available through third parties, but Penn State doesn’t really offer a lot of scholarships since it is such a big university. The exception to that would be the Shreyer’s Honors College which I know does give out scholarships to their students.

Truthfully, I would really consider if you want to pay out-of-state tuition to come to Penn State. The University itself is very exciting and there are definitely unique experiences you can have by being a Penn State student, but the nursing program here is average. You’re not going to get very much here that you wouldn’t get at any other, cheaper, accredited nursing school. Your clinical assignments will be sorely lacking without great experience and a lot of wasted time (no joke, some of the facilities and hospitals you go to you spend the day watching movies with the residents or stripping beds and passing ice chips all day, both very important things for patient well being, but in no way enhancing the learning experience for junior and senior level students). The truth is Happy Valley isn’t really located for access to a lot of good clinical sites and the ones they do have are over crowded due to the fact that the Penn State College of Nursing frequently over-accepts freshmen. There is not enough faculty attention to go around and those students that don’t receive the help they need fall through the cracks and fail or drop out. As you progress into your junior and senior years, the overcrowding becomes a real problem because you don’t get placement in the types of clinical sites, internships or Capstone sites that you really need to further your education (like ED, ICUs, more advanced med-surge floors, etc.).

There is a lot of discussion about how competitive the CON is at Penn State and that’s true but not just because of the difficulty of the major material. The CON is really poorly administrated and seems to want to invest in students very little after they’ve already been accepted (possibly a result of the over-acceptance discussed before). They artificially create a lot of the competitive environment by doing things such as rearranging students schedules due to oversights by CON administration meaning some students can’t get classes they need for minors or graduation requirements, creating more arbitrary “hoops” to jump through/ways to fail out (additional proctored tests, severe grade drops for minor infractions, new testing software that students were required to buy that makes taking exams more complicated, creating events that are mandatory to attend outside of class time even if the event conflicts with another one of your classes, failing Sophmore students in clinicals for making mistakes/not performing at a level that should only be expected of a senior student… the list goes on and on). I’ve heard of clinical instructors telling their students they better be at the 6AM clinical site that is 45 minutes away through a hilly, mountainous drive or else they will fail clinical even though there were several inches of snow expected, the drive would become unsafe and the students might get stranded at the clinical site. There’s many many more things I could share but I hope you get the picture.

Basically what I’m getting at is that I don’t think its worth it to spend nearly $40,000 a year to come to school here from halfway across the country and half to deal with the things I’ve described. Its not all bad and I have had some really amazing, caring clinical instructors and really cool clinical experiences as well as learned a lot in some specific classes (Patho and Nurs 405A for sure). I love Penn State (the university itself) and I’ve had a good time here. I’m an A+/B+ student and I’m not trying to discourage you from going here just because I’m bitter about failing or something like that. I’m on track to graduate and pass my NCLEX hopefully without a problem. I just want you to be able to have all the information before you make a decision. Its been about 40/60 good to bad experiences here and truthfully, if I were in your shoes, I don’t think I would have been able to justify going that far away from home and paying that much money for that kind of an experience.

@PSUstudentnurse , sorry that you haven’t had the best experience, although it sounds like you are performing well academically, which is great. My daughter has had the opposite experience.

Yes, PSU has a number of controlled majors that have caps on the number of students they can actually advise in their junior and senior years. Because of this, and knowing students often change majors or drop out, it makes sense that they may start with 180 students knowing only 150 may move onto junior and senior clinicals. I think Nursing is far better than business and engineeeing, where they have many more students in the premajor plus many in DUS also going for the same limited number of spots. Thinning of the herd is deliberate. Business and engineering have a far more brutal weed out process than nursing IMHO. And this process is common at many big universities. They want to see who is going to commit the hours and rise to the challenge. You can’t afford to be a C/D student when you are caring for critically ill people. Again, you aren’t that so kudos for all your hard work.

Re: clinicals, the year at Hershey should give students exposure to more complex cases. Going there senior year when you have more experience may be a better option for some. You are correct that a lot f clinicals near PSU aren’t terribly impressive but many programs in non-metro areas will have the same issue. That is why the school sends students to Hershey for a year. My daughter has been very lucky with clinicals and never was forced to drive in unsafe conditions. If anything , the university would delay the start of classes, which would cancel clinicals that morning. And I recently found out that my JD was doing double clinicals for one class for a few weeks because she didn’t feel she had the confidence she needed. Instructors have been very accommodating and have above and beyond to help her succeed, but she’s also in their faces when she needs help.

By no means do I want to dismiss your concerns about the program. I just want prospective students to know there are alternative opinions out there.

It is one of the more time consuming majors, so yes people will fail out or be forced to transfer to a different major. But that’s not exclusive to CON. The alternative would be the non-direct entry model, which my kiddo did not want. That’s where several hundred kids tentatively accepted into pre-nursing and then they duke it out for the top 100 to 150 spots at the end of sophomore year. I’ve heard awful posts about students fighting for 4.0 GPAs so they are officially accepted into the major. Those who fall short have to transfer out to another college or change majors. Bottom line: BSNs are tough programs to get into and tough to stay in.

Nursing is a tough degree no matter where you go.

I am a nurse. Second career…didn’t go to nursing school until I was 47, graduated with a 3.9 and passed my NCLEX in 75 questions six days after graduation last May. I had a job lined up 6 months prior to graduation. I just went through all of this rigamarole in the last year and I have some thoughts to share.

I went to a diploma school (there are many in Pittsburgh, though not really in other parts of the country), which was a 16-month rigorous immersive program. I had 1200 clinical hours in 16 months (compared to PSU 900 over 4 years) in very diverse and complicated settings. Now I’m doing my BSN online and because of my previous degrees will finish the BSN In 6 months. I paid a total of $30,000 for my nursing school and my employer is paying for my BSN 100%. I make exactly the same as a new grad with a diploma as a new grad coming out of Penn State. EXACTLY. THE.SAME.

My point is this, nursing is one of those careers that have a multitude of paths to get there. It does not have to be like described above in previous posts. A BSN is necessary if one wants to ever move out of floor nursing, and in some areas of the country, it IS necessary to have a BSN to get that first job. But explore your market. In Pittsburgh, you can EASILY get hired with an associate’s degree or diploma in nursing and then your employer pays for all or most of your BSN. I did the diploma because it was the cheapest and fastest way there. The second degree BSN programs were twice as much. It was brutally difficult and more than half the class failed out. That part is universal. Nursing is one hell of a tough major no matter where you go.

My actual BSN classes now, however, are teaching me nothing about being a better nurse. They are teaching me how to write APA papers and do research - which is important for non-floor nursing jobs. But they aren’t important to what I do on the unit every day.

If I had a child interested in nursing, I don’t think I’d have them go to Penn State - and that is coming from a DIE HARD Penn State fan! The truth that no one wants to ever tell you is that whether you go to a $100,000 Ivy league nursing school, a $30,000-$50,000 Penn State nursing school, or a $12,000 community college nursing program, as soon as you all pass the NCLEX you are all the SAME NURSE AT THE SAME LEVEL making the SAME AMOUNT OF MONEY. So, don’t spend a lot of money for a nursing degree. I’d send my kid to a state school that costs a lot less. When I get my BSN in a couple of months, I will make exactly $1.00 more per hour. That’s only because I have at least 6 months experience.

Also, don’t fall into the trap of thinking BSN nurses are better. In all of my clinical sites, the nurses on the unit loved having us there vs. the BSN programs in the area because we were hands-on from literally day one. My first week had three clinical days. Most BSN students don’t see their first day of clinical until their sophomore year. Moreover, don’t think associate’s degree nurses learn less than BSN nurses.
Not true. In fact, one of the BSN nursing programs in Pittsburgh has ALL of their nursing classes at the diploma school. We all take the exact same NCLEX.

Again, a BSN is needed to move forward in this field. I’m not advocating for not getting a BSN. But a BSN teaches you nothing more about FLOOR NURSING than an associates degree. It just doesn’t.

I work with nurses in MOUNTAINS of debt because they went to very expensive nursing schools, and we take home the same paycheck. My advice, find the cheapest nursing school with the highest NCLEX pass rates and go there.

@jlhpsu So sorry for the late response! Thank you so much for taking the time to write all that. It really helped me a lot. I actually just got into another direct entry nursing program with cheaper tuition, so I have a lot to think about. Thanks again for your help!

For future prospective nursing students, @jlhpsu is totally right. I’ve heard from more than one person that, at the end of the day, hiring managers just care that you passed the NCLEX.