The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's New Careers in Nursing Scholarship Program is a national program of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the American Association of Colleges of Nursing. The program hopes to help alleviate the nursing shortage, increase diversity among nursing professionals, expand capacity of baccalaureate and graduate nursing programs, and enhance the pipeline of potential nurse faculty.

Through grants to schools of nursing, the program will provide scholarships of $10,000 each to more than 1500 college graduates without nursing degrees who are enrolled in accelerated baccalaureate and master's nursing programs. A school of nursing may apply for between 5 and 30 scholarships per year to be awarded to students from underrepresented groups in nursing and disadvantages backgrounds.

In the first round of awards, 58 schools of nursing in 31 states were awarded a total of $7.06 million for scholarships. The next call for proposals will take place in the fall of 2009. For more information, visit http://newcareersinnursing.org/index.html.