Recruitment, retention and matriculation of ethnic minority nursing students: a University of Mississippi School of Nursing approach.

According to Bednash (2000), the future of health care pivots on an adequate supply of appropriately educated and skilled professional registered nurses. Recognizing the long history of and the struggles by African-American (AA) nurses for education and equality in the nursing profession, it is essential that more African-American students be recruited, retained, and matriculated into the profession of nursing. African-American nurses have always contributed to the care of the poor and the sick and played a decisive role in the improvement of the health of their communities. The Bureau of Health Professions Division of nursing (March 2000) reported that 86.6 percent of the registered nurse population were white while 12.3 percent represented racial and ethnic minority groups. Given the current racial/ethnic background of the registered nurse population in the United States, there is an obvious disparity in the representation of minorities in the nursing profession, in spite of the increasing number of minorities represented in the general population. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to document strategies that are used to actively recruit, retain, and graduate ethnic minority students from the University of Mississippi Medical Center (UMMC) School of Nursing (SON).