Radford University will seek to double number of nursing students after merger with Jefferson College
Radford University and Carilion Clinic’s Jefferson College of Health Sciences expect that an upcoming merger will lead to doubling the number of nursing students within five years.
Jefferson is on target to become part of Radford by the fall semester. The schools announced in January 2018 that they planned to merge.
Radford President Brian Hemphill said Monday that the merger is designed to address workforce shortages in the health fields, and that nursing graduates should double from 200 to 400 or 450 in five years.
“Nursing has significant shortages. I said from the beginning, if we merge and are still producing the same number of graduates as a combined entity, then this is a failure,” he said. “So we need to look at how we’re going to grow, and what the pipeline will look like. We will have to look at faculty, at services and the strategic partnership to meet the needs of the region and the commonwealth.”
To read more about the merger, check out the link below.