Right now the number of U.S. states that allow community colleges to offer nursing degrees is in the minority. Only 20 states have this facility, and it’s highly conditional. Michigan is currently looking at the idea as a way of combating a forecast shortage of nurses in the state, and the concept raises quite a few relevant points nationally.

Michigan’s battered economy is a working case study of the condition of many state budgets and depressed areas where the affordability of degrees is in direct proportion to the economics of the region. The state population’s financial ability to access skills training has to be considered marginal at best.

The idea is basically that a four-year community college course is a more realistic and far more affordable approach to training nurses than a high cost university degree. This is a very practical, helpful approach to the serious shortages of the industry and the needs of students. The economics aren’t in dispute, but the perceived obstacles to the idea in Michigan include a “turf war” with traditional four-year institutions.

Community colleges are already the default training machinery for lower income brackets nationwide. The major league universities are essentially the beneficiaries of a system where they’re the accredited providers of qualifications, and people who can’t afford their fees can’t train and can’t qualify.

The “degree dichotomy” tends to show up in some unhelpful places in terms of allowing access to skills training. Skills shortages in many areas may or may not be blamed on this exclusion effect, but there’s little doubt that would-be trainees’  financial bottom lines can only handle so much.

While the quality of university nursing college training isn’t in dispute, the quantity must be. It makes little or no sense to create a shortage of desperately needed skilled people “on principle,” particularly when that principle has nothing to do with the needs of the state or the nation.

It also short-circuits access to higher degrees. The Bachelors Degree is the starting point for the whole new class of advanced nursing which is having such a positive impact throughout the health care sector.

Getting in the door is the problem. Nearly all big name universities do try to make allowances for low income bracket applicants, but that’s usually through endowments and grants. There aren’t enough of those going around to begin to address the need for more homegrown nurses.

In structural terms, it does make sense that the bigger institutions, with their advanced facilities, should concentrate on advanced nursing training and “delegate” the undergraduate studies outside to community colleges. As it is, community colleges often provide basic training, the intro level for nursing. It’d be a logical move for them to provide continuity in training also, to at least Bachelors level.

Twenty U.S. states do allow community colleges to award degrees under certain conditions. Whether the public interest is served by “circumstantial” provision of skills training is doubtful. The country needs nurses. It doesn’t need obstacles to training them.