The nursing education program at Elgin Community College is becoming very popular, attracting more applicants than it can accept, college officials said.
But it is also becoming so expensive to operate that college officials are thinking about charging more tuition per credit hour for nursing courses than they charge for most other courses.
The only course now that charges more per credit hour is truck driving.
That possibility was proposed to the ECC Board of Trustees recently by Ann Amaefule, the director of the nursing program, and Wendy Miller, the dean of health programs.
Board members discussed the idea and ECC President David Sam said he would come back with a specific recommendation in January.
Miller and Amaefule said nursing courses are more expensive to run than most other courses because they require a lot of hands-on “clinical” work with few students per teacher. They also involve more hours of class time per credit hour than most majors, and at ECC they use many expensive-to-maintain-and-operate simulation models and mannequins, college officials said.
Miller and Amaefule said that situation will grow worse in the next year or two as the college moves from an old curriculum that teaches students “a lot of details about a lot of details that they may or may not see in their practice” and goes to a “concept-based curriculum.” On top of that, she said, local hospitals who take in ECC students for clinical training are demanding that there be fewer students per teacher. The group that accredits nursing education wants ECC to reduce the number of credit hours per student, which would reduce the amount of total tuition paid by each.
Amaefule said several community colleges already charge more for nursing than ECC and more for nursing than for most other courses. ECC now charges the same $119 per credit hour that it charges for courses like English and history. She said Harper College charges $220.50 an hour for nursing, College of DuPage $244.15 and Kishwaukee Community College $238.
Miller estimated that over and above income from tuition and state reimbursements, the nursing program is running an annual deficit of $1.35 million. She said that will go up to $1.7 million under the new curriculum being planned if tuition remains at $119 an hour, and will even reach almost $1.2 million if nursing tuition is doubled, to $238 an hour.
The most vehement objection to increasing tuition came from Trustee Art Sauceda. He said he fears that high tuition would make it hard for students with low or moderate incomes to study nursing.
Amaefule said even $238 an hour would still be cheaper than studying nursing at a four-year college, and with nurses earning an average of $26 per hour, new nurses should be able to pay off any student loans they need to take out.
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“A majority become employed in six to 12 months of leaving the college,” she said.
Trustee Jeff Meyer asked whether there could be some way to close the deficit without raising tuition. Miller said that long-term, some clinical hours working with real patients could be replaced with more simulation activities using mannequins.
Trustee Eleanor MacKinney asked whether cutting the number of nursing students would save money. Miller said that would cause some faculty members to not have enough work hours. Besides that, she and Amaefule said, there already are more people wanting to get into the program than the college can handle.
In fall 2013, 165 people applied for 80 openings in the program. Last spring 98 applied for 40 openings, and this fall 95 applied for 80 open slots.
There are now 78 waiting to get into one of 40 slots that will open in the spring term.