Michaelcohn Posted January 12, 2016 Share Posted January 12, 2016 Whats the attrition rate at your school? Have you known people that have left your program? I know PA schools do their best to recruit hardworking students that will pass but Im j/c to know what typical attrition rates look like. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
marktheshark89 Posted January 12, 2016 Share Posted January 12, 2016 0% in the last 3 years, but our school does absolutely everything they can to keep someone. We have had a few graduate a few months late but mostly for nonacademic reasons. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Administrator rev ronin Posted January 12, 2016 Administrator Share Posted January 12, 2016 This is an important question to ask before you matriculate anywhere, because any set of idiots can call themselves a faculty, accept 100 students, fail the 25-40 who are having problems, and graduate a class of 60-75 who have no problem passing the PANCE. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
marktheshark89 Posted January 12, 2016 Share Posted January 12, 2016 Though that is an exagerration in my estimate, i agree it is a very important question to ask. I know programs that routinely find a reason to dismiss an otherwise borderline or barely passing student due to concern that they will fail pance and ruin school reputation. IMO these places should be avoided. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
PAtoBin2017 Posted January 12, 2016 Share Posted January 12, 2016 I know one of the programs where I interviewed did their best to evade answering the question. I knew from looking at their website what their normal class size was ... and one year their PANCE 1st time pass rates showed the number taking the test as about 11% less than their typical class size. I never got an actual answer to my question. My program lost 2 people within 1st semester - one for personal health reasons, one due to a family crisis. We did pick up one person from the prior year who had to withdraw due to personal health reasons. We also had one person that was a deferral from prior year admissions due to a personal commitment. We also lost a person in this 3rd semester for some apparently personal reason. All three of the current year losses are expected to return with the next year's new class. I've been told they dismissed someone a few years prior for unprofessionalism. No one has been forcibly dropped for academic performance ... yet. There are a few at risk. Unfortunately, the faculty's contribution to avoiding that appears to be less than stellar. If they survive, it will be entirely their own success and no credit to the program. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
UGoLong Posted January 13, 2016 Share Posted January 13, 2016 What you ask is a central differentiation point with PA programs. Some tend to weed out students as they go. Others try harder to remediate students who are having trouble. In the end, the student has to do the work. Still, I would not attend a program whose approach is to weed out, leaving broken bodies along the roadside. But it's a personal decision. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Michaelcohn Posted January 13, 2016 Author Share Posted January 13, 2016 What you ask is a central differentiation point with PA programs. Some tend to weed out students as they go. Others try harder to remediate students who are having trouble. In the end, the student has to do the work. Still, I would not attend a program whose approach is to weed out, leaving broken bodies along the roadside. But it's a personal decision. Really? I don't think any PA schools actually weed students out. That would look terrible and could cause them to lose accreditation. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
marktheshark89 Posted January 13, 2016 Share Posted January 13, 2016 ^think again Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Michaelcohn Posted January 13, 2016 Author Share Posted January 13, 2016 ^think again Whats the incentive in weeding students out? If they keep students then they get additional years of tuition, maintain accreditation, keep reputation, etc. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
FfIghter23 Posted January 13, 2016 Share Posted January 13, 2016 Whats the incentive in weeding students out? If they keep students then they get additional years of tuition, maintain accreditation, keep reputation, etc. Nah, who in their right mind would keep a below average student to become the medical provider for their family? This isn't an MBA program. PAs school are in the business of training competent providers. End of question. If they deviate in from that goal, I would rethink going to that program. I'd be more than happy to see a 100% first time pass PANCE rate for only 28 students than a 90% pass rate out of 60 students. That's six people that I would have a problem with being my PCP. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Administrator rev ronin Posted January 13, 2016 Administrator Share Posted January 13, 2016 Whats the incentive in weeding students out? If they keep students then they get additional years of tuition, maintain accreditation, keep reputation, etc. Weed them out before clinicals, and you don't have to have as many clinical sites, but you still get to keep all the didactic tuition. After all, the additional cost to lecture to 10 more students is trivial. Plus, if you weed out the low-end students, all your rotations are that much more impressed with the quality of your students and like your school better. And the PANCE pass rates stay high, because you've not *graduated* anyone unless they excel at standardized tests, so you have an army of applicants each year who won't question the retention rate as long as 1st time PANCE pass rate is above national average. Make no mistake about it, higher education is a great money-making opportunity. The fact that we have as many programs as we do who remediate vs. chew-up-and-spit-out is a testament to our profession's overall ethics... but don't think that all of those are universally still held. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
db_pavnp Posted January 13, 2016 Share Posted January 13, 2016 Nah, who in their right mind would keep a below average student to become the medical provider for their family? This isn't an MBA program. Half of every class is below average. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MT2PA Posted January 13, 2016 Share Posted January 13, 2016 Whats the incentive in weeding students out? If they keep students then they get additional years of tuition, maintain accreditation, keep reputation, etc. I can't imagine a program's accreditation is dependent upon attrition. If you accept good candidates and they can't cut it, why should the program be punished? Why push through students who can't keep up just to make your numbers look good? The other side of that is - you push through students who aren't great, maybe they pass PANCE, then they become subpar clinicians and that will reflect even more poorly upon the program. A few extra years of tuition is not worth the reputation of producing bad PAs. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
FfIghter23 Posted January 13, 2016 Share Posted January 13, 2016 Half of every class is below average. It must be tough going through that nursing school curriculum. We missed your insightful comments. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Michaelcohn Posted January 13, 2016 Author Share Posted January 13, 2016 I can't imagine a program's accreditation is dependent upon attrition. If you accept good candidates and they can't cut it, why should the program be punished? Why push through students who can't keep up just to make your numbers look good? Well I would think the accrediting bodies work like those for med school. The LCME and COCA would go crazy if schools had a 20% drop out rate. Plus I know that med schools do almost everything possible to keep students. It doesn't make sense that PA schools would function differently in this aspect. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
WWUViking1983 Posted January 13, 2016 Share Posted January 13, 2016 We lost 13 out of 85 students our fist quarter. That being said, they are given the chance to return next year with the incoming class to repeat. So I don't know if that counts as attrition. But our program has a 97% PANCE pass rate for those that survive (including those that repeat). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
db_pavnp Posted January 13, 2016 Share Posted January 13, 2016 It must be tough going through that nursing school curriculum. We missed your insightful comments. I have only ever commented on posts that fall below a certain threshold of stupidity. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
UGoLong Posted January 13, 2016 Share Posted January 13, 2016 Yes, some schools do use a weed-out process. Is that good because it weeds out sub-par students who will become sub-par providers? Maybe sometimes. But we don't have to look very far to find people who did so-so (or worse) in school and turned out making monumental achievements in the real-world. It's seen in PA school when the below average student suddenly excels during his or her clinical rotations. It is a personal choice where you apply. I submit that the program's attitude can be an important variable. Only you get to decide how important it is to you. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
FfIghter23 Posted January 14, 2016 Share Posted January 14, 2016 I have only ever commented on posts that fall below a certain threshold of stupidity. Address the OP or get lost. Be careful how much you troll. Don't want to get banned here. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
db_pavnp Posted January 14, 2016 Share Posted January 14, 2016 Throw stones much, son? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MT2PA Posted January 14, 2016 Share Posted January 14, 2016 Well I would think the accrediting bodies work like those for med school. The LCME and COCA would go crazy if schools had a 20% drop out rate. Plus I know that med schools do almost everything possible to keep students. It doesn't make sense that PA schools would function differently in this aspect. There's a difference between helping your students succeed and covering for them purely for numbers. Sure, any program with a consistent 20% drop out rate will raise flags for ARC-PA, but they wouldn't automatically lose accreditation. I highly doubt any program has yearly drop out rates that high. Those that weed out may have 1-2/cycle and that doesn't mean they were all dropped for academic reasons - students leave for personal reasons all the time. In a previous life, in a previous career, I was in a program of 6 students. 1 left voluntarily after 3 months. Another should have been kicked out for academic reasons but the program worried about their numbers so they let her hobble along. She was so bad at her job, she almost killed someone. Moral of the story: there's a happy medium. It's great that most programs try to help their students but there IS a line where you can't just help everyone along so that your program looks good. It'll bite you in the rear later. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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