This may come as a shock to some people, but I am here to tell you that nursing school is not that hard. I was told by countless people prior to nursing school that it would be extremely difficult. Like, prepare to eat, sleep, and breath nursing school for the next two years kind of difficult. I have heard it characterized as the most difficult undergrad program there is. A quick google of “Is nursing school hard?” yields a full page of links with answers ranging from “yes” to “challenging but possible to succeed with hard work.” Basically, it doesn’t take much time near the world of nursing to become inundated with the idea that the education required to become a nurse stands apart in its rigor and difficulty.
I will grant you that my bachelor’s degree in nursing required more work to attain than did my bachelor’s in psychology. However, that isn’t really saying a whole lot. I spent much more time playing Final Fantasy XI Online during my first round through an undergraduate degree than I ever did studying and still managed to get As in most psychology courses. While psychology may be among the least academically rigorous courses of study, I don’t think that nursing qualifies as one of the most difficult. There are any number of degrees that are more difficult to obtain than a nursing degree.
Let’s start with comparisons to what could be fairly considered the highest difficulty degrees out there, Law and Medicine. Medical and law school are graduate programs, so they aren’t really fair comparisons to nursing school, but since we nurses seem to love to talk about how hard nursing school is I’m going to compare them anyway. I’m sure there are plenty of other extremely difficult graduate programs out there. The comparison to medical school is natural to make because the two career fields interact with each other a lot. I bring up law school because of my personal experience being adjacent to it as well as it being commonly understood to be a difficult program of study.
My wife went through law school. That was three years of her essentially studying/in class/writing for 12 hours a day, 6-7 days per week. Undergrad nursing school is typically a 2-year program. During nursing school, I had basically all of my evenings and weekends available. Sure, there were times when I needed to put in some extra studying, finish assignments, or prepare for exams, but for the most part it was a Monday-Friday, regular business hours gig. There was ample time on campus between classes or on days where I had very few classes to get most of the work done. Clinical hours are scheduled for you, so you know exactly when and how long you will be in clinicals. Having not studied it, I can’t delve into difficulty of the content matter of law school. My guess would be that it is at least as difficult as any nursing content and probably more so. Also, there is a lot more of it overall. Like I said though, it isn’t fair to compare an undergraduate nursing program to law school
To continue with unfair comparisons, if anybody has ever suggested to you that nursing school is on par in difficulty with medical school, they were ignorant and/or lying. Nursing is an undergraduate degree (or even associate’s degree, but we will get to that). Like law school, medical school is a graduate program. The only real comparison to nursing school is that physicians also complete an undergraduate degree before even beginning medical school. The undergrad degrees that most medical school applicants get are more academically difficult than nursing school. The science prerequisites that medical school applicants must complete are typically upper division courses. Nursing programs tend to require 100 level basic science courses (i.e., Chem 101, Biology 101). These are courses that any reasonably well-prepared high school graduate would could take and pass in their first semester of college. Most medical schools don’t require any particular undergrad degree, but it is not unusual to see degrees in biological sciences or other academically rigorous degrees. Pre-med is not a degree program, but prospective medical school applicants need to make sure they take required prerequisite courses. The point is, lets clear our heads of any delusion that nursing school is even in the same ballpark of difficulty as medical or law school. It is an order of magnitude easier in both amount of time spent studying and complexity of subject matter.
Alright, so we have established that comparing nursing school to a professional graduate degree program is a ridiculous thing to do. Nursing school is not as hard as those programs. What about other undergraduate degrees then? Is nursing, as I have heard it characterized, the most difficult undergraduate program? That is also a hard no as far as I’m concerned. That distinction probably goes to hard or applied sciences. My friends who are engineers worked way harder than I did at any point in my nursing education. Much like nursing, admission into the college of engineering at my undergrad university requires its own admission and acceptance process separate from general university admission. Unlike nursing, admittance and staying in an engineering program requires learning advanced mathematics and applying them. For reference, my nursing class had to take a ten-question math test related to medication administration. This was a source of much anxiety and long hours of studying for many people. I still have a few e-mails from instructors regarding this math test and the potential for having remedial education if you didn’t pass it. This dreaded math test literally had questions like:
- You have received an order to administer 8 mg of ondansetron IV. The preparation of ondansetron that you have available is concentrated at 4mg/mL. How many mLs will you administer?
- You have an order to administer 3.375gms of pipercillin-tazobactam over 30 minutes as an IV infusion. The solution for administration contains 3.375gms of pipercillin-tazobactam in 100mL of 0.9% sodium chloride. At what rate in mLs/hour do you set the infusion pump?
For comparison, here is an example test question in differential equations, a course that engineers must take. I googled and stole this question from Carnegie-Mellon University:
- A tank originally contains 10 gal of water with 1/2 lb of salt in solution. Water containing a salt concentration of 1/200 (10−t) 2 (sin(t)+ 1) lb per gallon flows into the tank at a rate of 1 gal/ min, and the mixture is allowed to flow out of the tank at a rate of 2 gal/ min. The mixture is kept uniform by stirring. Let Q(t) (in lb) be the amount of salt in the tank after time t (in min).
- How long (in min) will it take for the tank to become empty?
- Answer: t = 10 min.
- Write the initial value problem for Q(t) (before the tank is empty) and solve it.
- Answer: Q(t) = 1/200 (10 − t) 2 (t − cos(t) + 2).
- How long (in min) will it take for the tank to become empty?
I should point out that this math test was by no means the most difficult part about nursing school. You could argue that nursing is difficult in different ways. Most engineers probably couldn’t handle some of the emotional, interpersonal, or downright disgusting things that nurses deal with, but those aren’t really academic problems. I suspect that most people who can make it through an undergraduate engineering program could handle the academic rigors of nursing school without breaking too much of a sweat.
So then if nursing school isn’t that difficult compared to some other undergraduate degrees, how does it stack up against less difficult undergraduate degrees? I’m not sure how to quantify this sort of comparison. I can tell you that my psychology degree was considerably easier than nursing school. The most difficult course of that whole program was probably 300 level statistics, and even that wasn’t exactly rocket science. Everything else was pretty much read and regurgitate information. Interestingly, most nursing programs require an introductory statistics course as a prerequisite and it is one of the prerequisite courses that you will hear cited as among the most difficult for nursing students. For reference, I would once again refer you to the mathematics requirements for engineering and other hard sciences for comparison. I don’t have firsthand experience with other degree programs, but I imagine that liberal arts degrees in general are not particularly difficult. It is probably fair to say that nursing is tougher than an English degree or sociology degree.
Why then, are so many people convinced that nursing school is so difficult? I suspect that it may have something to do with the fact that you can become a nurse with only an associate’s degree. That’s right, there are two distinct academic paths to becoming a nurse. There has been a push to make a bachelor’s degree the minimum qualification to RN licensure for decades. It hasn’t come to pass for a number of reasons that aren’t worth getting into right now. According to the American Association of Colleges of Nursing as of 2019, 56% of nurses across the country had obtained a bachelor’s degree. That leaves a very significant proportion of nurses who are only educated at an associate’s degree level.
Why does that matter? Plenty of people would argue that it doesn’t. When I graduated with by BSN in 2012, the common refrain I heard was that ADN prepared nurses were better prepared to the clinical work of nursing than their BSN prepared counterparts. That is of course, complete bullshit that may warrant its own posting on a later date. But the take home point for this discussion is that an associate’s degree is the highest level of formal education that many nurses have ever received. The academic rigor of an associate’s degree nursing program is probably pretty similar to that of a bachelor’s program. Bachelor’s prepared nurses spend a bit more time learning about science and research as well as participate in a wider range of clinical experiences. But overall, the rigor is pretty similar.
Suddenly, we are comparing a bachelor’s degree program that is middle of the road in difficulty not with other bachelor’s degree programs, but with the offerings of a community college. In that context, I can see nursing school being one of the more difficult programs of study. You can also factor in that, while the actual nursing program at a community college takes 2 years to complete, it also takes about 2 years to complete the prerequisites needed to apply to the nursing program. So yeah, nursing school is probably a lot harder than most associate’s degrees. It also makes sense if you consider that community colleges have a high percentage of “non-traditional” students who are older, starting a new career, don’t speak English as their primary language, or have just been out of academia for a long time. All of these things might contribute to the perception of nursing school as being extremely difficult.
None of this is to say that nursing is a bad career choice. In fact, it is a pretty damn good one. You’d be hard pressed to find a career that you can get into with only an associate’s degree with better pay and employment opportunities. Nor is it to say that ADN prepared nurses are no good. I just tire of hearing about how hard nursing school is. It isn’t. It is moderately difficult at worst as far as academic degrees go. Let’s stop pretending that it takes some kind of extraordinary amount of intelligence, work ethic, and natural ability to make it through nursing school. I don’t know of any other profession that constantly talks about how difficult their schooling was, even years after the fact. There are plenty of reasons to be proud of yourself for being a nurse. The rigor of your formal education is not really one of them.
One caveat I’ll offer here is this. I went through my undergraduate nursing program after having already completed a 4-year degree, so I was already fairly well versed in academia. I also did it without having to work while in nursing school, without children, without food or financial insecurity, and without having learn English. I came at it from a very privileged position. Many people are not in that position and that would make getting a nursing degree or any other degree exponentially more difficult. My point is that if we are specifically comparing the academic difficulty of nursing to other degree programs, all other things being equal, nursing school is not that hard.