Southern Vermont College

I recently attended an event where I was surprised to hear the featured speaker refer to the field of nursing as a ‘pink ghetto’. The term was coined 30 years ago as a way to describe low paying jobs for women that limited their advancement and the quantum of professional respect they received. As applied to nursing today, this is a flawed term – an anachronism in the healthcare workplace.

At Southern Vermont College, we have both female and male nursing students training to become the healthcare leaders of tomorrow, and their prospective workplaces will be neither “pink” nor a “ghetto.” Indeed, these graduates comprise a critical part of our workforce.

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I participated in a recent conference sponsored by the New England Board of Higher Education, aptly titled “After the Crash: A New Reality for Higher Education.”  At this event, there was considerable discussion about how to navigate today’s educational landscape, given the state of the economy, state capacity to fund higher education, the costs of higher education, changing demographics and the Administration’s push for more degree recipients.

The data documenting the state of higher education do not paint a pretty picture, as observed by Dennis Jones, the president of the National Center for High Education Management Systems, a presenter at the conference. His most recent data for NCHEMS, which analyzes data on higher ed policy decisions, can be reviewed here. The Delta Project develops data and policy tools to improve productivity and public accountability for performance in secondary education. Click here for their latest reports.  

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