In the main I agree with this sentiment, but you're being reflexive here, which gets you into trouble. The movement towards BSN degrees follows a significant amount of research showing that BSN degrees correlate with superior patient outcomes. You wouldn't call a degree credentialing requirement for an MD "an elite war on the working class", nor would you visit a doctor without a degree. You're happy to throw a little culture war barb at nursing credentials because: you don't respect the profession. It is much, much harder than it looks. Its biggest problem is that it has a stupid name; they should be called "associate physicians".
You can reasonably disagree with state statutes requiring BSNs for RN licensure! But you can't pretend that the notion is risible, the way you have here. It is not.
You’ve whiffed it. Lots of people in my extended family are nurses or nursing-adjacent. Some have degrees and some don’t. I think it’s a really important job and it’s really good that elite gatekeepers haven’t gotten to nursing yet. I also think you shouldn’t need a college degree to be a programmer or a lawyer and probably not a doctor either. All of those jobs could be done by people with focused applied education, rather than theoretical academic education.
My view is pretty much exactly the opposite of what you suggest: I think few jobs including mine, justify the time and expense of a theoretical university education. Cancer researchers and civil or nuclear engineers, sure. But we shouldn’t use college degrees as barriers to keep “the proles” out of large segments of the workforce.
Lots of people in most extended families are nurses or nursing-adjacent, Rayiner. It's an extremely popular career. I'm Irish Catholic, which is the "my father is from a village in Bangladesh"-equivalent mic drop of "being related to lots of nurses".
As I said, that's not what we're doing: we have empirical data that says that additional training improves patient outcomes. If you truly believe that doctors shouldn't require degree credentialing, there's not much more for us to discuss.
At any rate, I just jumped in here to point out that nursing is not in fact a reliable pathway to a solid middle class career that doesn't require a college degree. All nurses have some kind of degree, most have 4-year college degrees, and in 10 years it's likely that all of them will.
It makes a lot of sense to me that nurses would generally have degrees. It does not make sense to me that sales account managers, HR professionals (the fastest growing white collar profession in the US), marketing communications specialists, bookkeepers, and project managers are required to have degrees. You saw the newly-elected Democratic governor of Pennsylvania run on the issue of eliminating degree requirements for public positions in his state; I'm optimistic we'll see a movement pressuring corporations to adopt similar rules, since they're fundamentally unjust and also serve to increase prices.
I assume in almost all professions more education correlates with better employees but I imagine most of that value is selection bias as opposed to causative.
Here’s a hub of links, though TBF there’s so much money at stake that my starting position is skeptical, even discounting rayiner’s concerns about elite institutional capture. Especially without a corresponding analysis of costs (maybe that’s here?)
I found a bunch of different studies some showed an effect some didn't. But all the ones I found linked the % of nurses with BSNs to outcomes which has two sources of possible confounds, the nurse level and the hospital level.
Maybe you've seen better studies than I could find that convinced you of this but all the studies I could find looked like bad science.
Everything positive in the world correlates with increased education level. Even lifespan. People with a BA live 3-4 years longer than without. But I'm under no impression that if we extended mandatory schooling to the age of 22 the average lifespan in the US would shoot up 3 years.
This is the problem in a nutshell. Sure, BSN provide better care. However, they don't provide better care than the number of regular nurses you could pay with the same money.
The US has an obsession with maximizing outcomes per clinician or per drug. It gives no or very little thought to outcomes per Healthcare dollars spent.
You can reasonably disagree with state statutes requiring BSNs for RN licensure! But you can't pretend that the notion is risible, the way you have here. It is not.