Ranting For Our Future RNs

I am livid.
Stark raving pitch a fit in the front office ranting until my eyes bug out livid.

One of our employees is signing up for a skin care program now being offered by our school.
Why is she doing that?
She figures that with that training, along with her massage therapy degree she will be able to make enough money to fund her true academic goal:

Getting a degree in nursing.

That is, of course, if she can get into a nursing program.

She is plenty smart. The problem is that there are not enough nurses who are willing to become college faculty at $20-40 thousand a year (after getting a Master's Degree) when they could be out there making twice that much money working as a nurse with just a basic degree.

So selfish of them....

Now why does this girl's plan to "Mask and Moisturize for Moolah" make me livid?

Because if she was a guy who wanted to go to college to play a sport, her entire tuition would likely be paid for.

And if she was good at her sport (in the same way that she currently is "good" at nursing related skills) she would not have to worry about not having anyone available to teach her required course work at a greatly reduced salary.

Why is that the case you may ask?

Answer: Because the "Faculty" for a degree in football get paid...are you ready for this?

Typically One MILLION dollars. Or more. Per year!

For "teaching" a goofy sport for five months a year.
Other kinds of sports "teachers" get paid almost equally well.

(oops, there isn't really a degree called "football" or "basketball" or "golf" , but there is money given to people who go to college to PLAY those games.)

Of course people (and by that I mean MEN) would argue that a good sports team brings lots and lots of money into the school.

So true.

Call me a sicko, but frankly seeing the owner of the Utah Jazz having a double amputation makes me wonder: was it important to him that he had nurses available to assist him as he recovered?

Or would it have been enough to have a couple of B-ball boys hanging with him until his stumps scabbed over?

Was the owner of the Carolina Panthers appreciative of the nursing staff following his recent heart transplant, or did he really wish the RN could have been a RW or QB instead?

Those guys make a living from the those sports scholarship folks that brought lots and lots of money to their schools. Money which in turn mostly gets used to build bigger and better sports programs which will bring in more money to build...you guessed right, more sports programs.

Once, just once, I'd like to see universities give all their sports program dollars to build their nursing programs, and pay nurses a six figure salary to teach LIVE SAVING INFORMATION for a change.

I'd like to see ALL aspiring nurses be PAID to go to school. A stipend, which they would get in addition to their "Paid in Full" tuition, just like the sweaty (but useless in an emergency) jocks get.

And if that is not possible, then I would suggest an alternative strategy:

Everyone involved with college sports and professional sports will not be able to have nurses available to them when they need them.

Just like the rest of us won't be able to have nurses when we need them either in a few years.
Maybe it will all even out: No nurses to care for sports injury = no sports.

It would be a lose-lose, but we can take comfort in knowing that if we won't be able to see professional football games, we can just tune into porn instead.

Lately, between Janet Jackson and this past SuperBowl, I'm not sure we could tell the difference anyway.

(Aside: Comcast apology: We are mortified by the incident and we apologize to our customers.
Apparently, like the child molester who was mortified by being caught but not actually mortified for molesting, we can be sure Comcast will continue to deliver porn with nary a twinge of guilt. Isn't the Super Bowl the only time that men aren't paying to view the stuff? That free sample was probably a great idea to get the guys back to it after the game was over!)

Learn more about the nursing shortage here.

And the next time someone wants to talk about sports, talk about nursing instead.

(This post is dedicated to LauraRN and RunningWildlyRN, PG and all the other nurses out there who should actually have their very own trading cards, Bowl Games, cheerleaders and product endorsement deals for fancy cars and nursing shoes. You go girls!)