The Helene Fuld College of Nursing in Harlem is not picturesque like the institutions shown in glossy college-recruiting catalogs. A small sign on a busy New York City street corner directs visitors up three flights of stairs to a cramped warren of refurbished classrooms, laboratories, study and computer centers, a library, and faculty offices. The furniture is mostly of the hand-me-down variety, a mixture of dented metal desks, mismatched chairs, and filing cabinets of every shape, size, and color.
Yet the nonprofit college's scruffy appearance belies what being accepted to Helene Fuld's associate degree program represents for most of its students: a chance at the American Dream.
The diverse student body of 378 is 94% minority and 12% men. Many students were born outside the United States, and most are older than students at typical nursing schools. The average student at Helene Fuld is in her mid-30s, but students range in age from their 20s to their 50s. Many, like Senobia Hughes, 38, originally from Panama, have been LPNs in hospitals or home care settings for years.
"I always wanted to be an RN, but for financial reasons and because I was raising kids, I didn't pursue it," says Hughes, a mother of four who, like many Helene Fuld students, commutes a long way by subway and bus to attend class. Others have held a variety of jobs while nurturing hopes of one day becoming an RN. From an economic standpoint, getting a degree from Helene Fuld can be life changing.
"Some of our graduates literally double their household income when they enter the field as RNs," says Helene Fuld's president, Margaret Wines, who has led the school since 1980. "Becoming an RN increases not only their opportunities, but also those of their families."
The 200 new RNs who graduate from Helene Fuld each year may seem a paltry number in the face of projections that more than a million new RNs will be needed by 2014 to augment the current U.S. workforce and replace retirees. Where Helene Fuld graduates finally land is hard to say because the nursing college doesn't systematically track the career paths of its alumni. Moreover, the college's mission has changed over the years.
Founded in 1945 as a Hospital for Joint Diseases-affiliated training school for practical nurses, in 1964 Helene Fuld became the first program in the country designed to help LPNs become degreed RNs. The college began offering an associate degree in 1975, phased out the practical nurse program in 1978, and in 1992 moved to its current location when the hospital, by then called North General, opened a new facility in Harlem.
In 2007, Helene Fuld took its boldest step yet, ending its association with the hospital and amending its charter to become an independent, nonprofit college with the mission of helping LPNs become RNs and offering opportunities "to men and women of diverse racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic backgrounds and to those who might otherwise have been excluded from career advancement."
To that end, the college offers unusually flexible class schedules as well as part-time options for students who can't afford or manage a full course load. "When we started evening classes in 2002, we doubled our enrollment," says Wines.
Administrators and faculty accommodate students' often precarious economic and personal circumstances in other ways, too. Some come to Helene Fuld never having used a computer, which led the college to set up a computer center and tweak the curriculum-for example, by making grades available only online-to underscore the importance of computer-based communication and research skills.
The college's quiet study alcove was created after faculty discovered a student studying in her car. "She had a traditional husband and four young children, and the only time she had to herself was at school or at work," recalls assistant professor Wendy Robinson. "So she told her family her home health job lasted until 4 pm even though it really ended at noon, after which she spent four hours studying in her car."
This drive to achieve despite the odds shows up in other ways, college officials say. Fifty percent of graduates continue their education and a significant number quickly move into positions of leadership in their new institutions. The faculty attributes the latter to the relative maturity of the students, many of whom bring significant experience from past jobs. Two graduates now working as RNs are retired New York City police officers. Another had been an airline pilot in Nigeria. Philip Lee, 31, was an elementary school teacher until a volunteer hospital job led him to undertake nursing studies.
"I'd always been interested in medicine and science, and I was really attracted to the relationship nurses had with their patients," says Lee, who left his teaching job two years ago to work as an LPN at New York's main public hospital, Bellevue Hospital Center. He worked the night shift while studying at Helene Fuld.
Admission to the college is contingent upon completing at least one year of LPN work and receiving employer recommendations, in addition to meeting academic and English proficiency requirements. Lee applied to the full-time program as soon as he completed a year at Bellevue, but some classmates, like Christine Mathurin, 34, have taken a more circuitous route, fitting coursework in around family and work responsibilities.
Mathurin, a single mother of three, tried attending the college part-time so she could continue working as an agency LPN to support her family. But it proved to be too much and she reluctantly decided to send her children to live with her parents in the U.S. Virgin Islands, take out education loans, and enroll full-time at Helene Fuld. "I'm going to graduate this year and my children will be there to see me walk up and get my degree," Mathurin says.
Beverly L. Malone, chief executive officer of the National League for Nursing, which represents nursing schools and faculty, applauds the college's commitment to helping LPNs move up the career ladder, noting that however atypical Helene Fuld students may seem, they reflect nursing's role throughout history as a profession that enabled women to achieve financial independence.
"Thank God for Helene Fuld that they respect where we come from and are helping us get to the next level," says Patricia Dacres-Thomas, 53, who emigrated from Jamaica. She supported herself with home care jobs while pursuing LPN status through a program sponsored by her union, 1199 Service Employees International Union. She learned about the college's associate degree program at a union-sponsored event that featured an administrator from Helene Fuld as a speaker. "She mentioned that there would be a reception for people interested in applying. I had the right day but the wrong time, and when I got there it was over. But a professor from the school was there and I told her about myself and she gave me an application."
Dacres-Thomas works weekends as a home health aide to cover expenses and rides buses and trains from Queens two hours each way to attend classes at Helene Fuld.
"I am never late and I am never absent," says Dacres-Thomas, who will graduate this year.
Irene M. Wielawski