Higher Education Opportunity Act - Conference Report

Floor Speech

HIGHER EDUCATION OPPORTUNITY ACT--CONFERENCE REPORT -- (Senate - July 31, 2008)

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Mr. SANDERS. I thank Senator Mikulski and Senator Brown. I will be very brief.

In the United States today, there is a nursing shortage approaching a crisis. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, more than 1.2 million new and replacement nurses will be needed by 2014. We are not educating enough nurses to meet this need, which is why the U.S. Department of Health foresees a nursing shortage of over 1 million by 2020. Yet, even with such an enormous need for nurses, U.S. nursing schools turned away--turned away--41,000 qualified applicants for baccalaureate and graduate nursing programs in 2005 because they do not have the resources to train more nurses. If community college nursing programs are included in these numbers, 150,000 well-qualified applicants are turned away each year from nursing programs.

The College Opportunity and Affordability Act includes an important new program which will enable our colleges to train more nurses to meet the nursing crisis. It provides extra capacity for nursing students in a very simple, efficient, and cost-effective way.

The nursing provision in title VIII provides colleges, community colleges, and universities a grant for each additional student their nursing program enrolls over their previous average enrollment. The nursing program gets a $3,000 grant for each additional student, money which will help defray the increased cost required to teach and train that student. With this program in place, nursing programs can expand to admit an additional 10,000 student nurses each year, or more, at modest costs.

I thank Chairman MIKULSKI, and I thank Huck Gutman of my office for his outstanding work over the last year. This is an outstanding program, and we are going to begin to address a serious problem.

I yield for Senator Brown.

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