Bilingual nurse education program: applicant characteristics that predict success.

Nurses are in great demand across the United States, but those fluent in both Spanish and English are in particularly short supply. This study examined three cohorts of students that entered a Spanish-English nursing education program to determine characteristics of applicants that produced student success. Unlike many nursing programs, entrance requirements for this bilingual program did not include a minimal grade point average (GPA) or previous course completions. Logistic regression was used to analyze the relationship between five different characteristics of entering students and their later success in the program. Success was measured in terms of program persistence and performance on the NCLEX-PN and NCLEX-RN exams. Incoming students with relatively high GPAs (M = 3.2) were significantly more likely to persist through the entire nursing 0ronram and oass the NCLEX-RN exam (t < .05) than those with lower GPAs (M = 2.5).