Golden West College nursing program expands to accept more students
Chi Trammell was living in Cerritos and set to graduate with a degree in pharmacology from UC Irvine less than 24 hours after her brother was murdered in 1995. As doctors tried to save his life on the operating table, she never forgot how the hospital’s nurses looked after their mother and father.
“During that time there were a lot of nurses when they were taking care of him who were there for my parents,” she said while choking back tears. “That love and care that I saw made me want to go into that field.”
She continued on as a pharmacist because she was a single mother at the time and focused on providing for her child, but always felt a calling to become a nurse. She later remarried and, with the support of her husband, applied for the nursing program at Golden West College.
There were only 40 spots available when Trammell was accepted in 2021. Her bachelor’s degree gave her a leg up over other candidates, many of whom might try for years to get in before they get a chance to enroll. There may be as many as 600 people applying any given semester, according to Alice Martanegara, associate dean and director of nursing for Golden West College.
“Generally, we find the same applicants applying again and again,” she said. “And they finally give up and go to private schools, where they charge $88,000 for an [associate degree in nursing] or around $160,000 for a bachelor’s degree.”
In comparison, classes cost $46 per unit at the Huntington Beach community college. Students pay around $7,000 over the course of the two-year nursing curriculum, Golden West spokeswoman Andrea Rangno said.
In February, the California Board of Registered Nurses approved the expansion of their program, allowing Golden West to accept 200 nursing students a year. They hope to admit as many as 80 of the applicants for the upcoming fall semester, and 100 students for each subsequent enrollment period.
The added spots come at a time when the American Association of Colleges of Nursing and other experts project a looming shortage of nurses in the U.S.
The number of registered nurses in America had been growing steadily since the ’80s, but fell significantly in the first 15 months of the pandemic, according to research based on population data. The total number of them working in the field fell by over 100,000 between 2020 and 2021. A significant portion of them were under the age of 35.
Applicants to Golden West’s nursing program range from 20 to 60 years old and come from all walks of life, Martanegara said. Some like Trammell manage careers and families. Many have their own hurdles to overcome on top of the rigorous curriculum at Golden West.
“A lot of our job is to support and encourage,” Gayle McLean, one of the roughly 40 instructors with doctorate level credentials training potential front-line healthcare workers at Golden West, said. “A lot of our students have kids and jobs or are dealing with housing insecurity or other challenges.”
A majority of their students live in and around Huntington Beach, Martanegara said. And all of them perform the clinical portion of their training at local healthcare facilities, providing essential care to the community. They also conduct many of the physical exams for high school sports teams in the area.
Realizing the urgent need for skilled and compassionate nurses in the U.S., administrators at Golden West began efforts to expand their nursing program in the midst of the pandemic, Martanegara said. They forged new agreements with local healthcare facilities to create more clinical training opportunities and grew their faculty in order to pave the way for the expansion approved last month. They’ve also made digital copies of textbooks available for free and secured funding to lower the cost of equipment students need to purchase.
Additionally, administrators have been finalizing an arrangement with Cal State San Bernardino that would allow nursing credits earned at Golden West to count at both campuses beginning next fall, Martanegara said. If all goes according to plan, students who graduate from the community college’s program could go on to earn a bachelor’s degree within six months.
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