A nursing student can be enrolled in a program that leads to a diploma, an associate degree or a Bachelor of Science in nursing.

HIStorical background

During past decades, the changes in education have replaced the more practically focused, but often ritualistic, training structure of conventional preparation. Nurse education integrates today a broader awareness of other disciplines allied to medicine, often involving inter-professional education, and the utilization of research when making clinical and managerial decisions. Orthodox training can be argued to have offered a more intense practical skills base, but emphasized the handmaiden relationship with the physician. This is now outmoded, and the impact of nurse education is to develop a confident, inquiring graduate who contributes to the care team as an equal. In some countries, not all qualification courses have graduate status.

Traditionally, from the times prior to Florence Nightingale, nursing was seen as an apprenticeship, often undertaken in religious institutes such as convents by young women, although there has always been a proportion of male nurses, especially in mental health services.

In 1859, Valérie de Gasparin and her Husband Agénor de Gasparin opens the first nursing school in the world in Lausanne, Switzerland : L’École La Source

Some other nurses at that time, notably Ethel Gordon Fenwick, were in favor of formalized nursing registration and curricula that were formally based in higher education and not within the confines of hospitals.

Nurse education in the United States is conducted within university schools, although it is unclear who offered the first degree level program. So far as known Yale School of Nursing became the first autonomous school of nursing in the United States in 1923.

In November 1955, a World Health Organization (WHO) study group on the education of nurses met in Brussels and made several recommendations, including that "At least one experimental school of nursing be set up in each country." In the UK, the first department of Nursing Studies at the University of Edinburgh was established in 1956, with a five-year integrated degree programme introduced in 1960. Several other universities across the UK during the 1960s. In 1974 La Trobe University commenced the very first nursing course in Australia.

United States

The history of nursing education had a long and varied role in the United States. Before the late 1800s little formal education was available to train nursing students. Education was primarily based on an apprenticeship with a senior nurse who taught bedside care within a hospital or clinic setting. Over time this model changed dramatically. A short chronology of Schools of Nursing in the United States is:

• In 1873, the Bellevue Hospital School of Nursing, of New York City, was founded. It was the first school of nursing in the United States to be founded on the principles of nursing established by Florence Nightingale. The School operated at Bellevue Hospital until its closure in 1969.
• 1883: The Medical University of South Carolina College of Nursing has been traced to its beginning in 1883 when the South Carolina Training School for Nurses was established at the request of Roper Hospital (known then as City Hospital) in Charleston, SC. Due to an earthquake in 1886 which destroyed the City Hospital, the effort only lasted a few years. However, once the new hospital was built the nursing program was reestablished in 1895 as the Charleston Training School. In 1916, the Board of Commissioners of the Roper Hospital proposed the transfer of the training school to the Medical College of the State of South Carolina, whose school of medicine had been established in Charleston in 1824 and whose faculty was already providing most of the nursing instruction. The proposal was accepted by both the hospital and the Medical College, and in 1919 the Roper Hospital Training School for Nurses became the School of Nursing of the Medical College of the State of South Carolina. In 1969 when the Medical College was designated the Medical University of South Carolina, the School of Nursing became the College of Nursing.
• 1889: The University of Maryland School of Nursing (UMSON) was founded by Louisa Parsons, a graduate of the Nightingale Fund School at St. Thomas' Hospital in London. UMSON is one of the oldest and largest nursing schools in the United States.
• 1889: The Johns Hopkins School of Nursing was founded in conjunction with the creation of the Johns Hopkins Hospital. As one of the earliest hospital-based nursing schools in the United States school leaders consulted with Florence Nightingale on the program of education. These same nurse leaders also established what would become the National League for Nursing Education and helped in establishing the American Nurses Association.
• In 1909, the University of Minnesota offered the first university based nursing program. It offered the first Bachelor of Science in Nursing degree and graduated the first bachelor's degree educated nurse.
• By 1916, 13 universities and 3 colleges had developed bachelor's nursing degree programs.
• In 1923, the Yale School of Nursing was founded. It became the first School of Nursing to adopt the educational standards from the 1923 Goldmark Report that was requested by the Rockefeller Foundation. The curriculum was based on an educational plan rather than on hospital service needs.
• In 1956, the Columbia University School of Nursing became the first in the United States to grant a master's degree in a clinical nursing specialty.