🔒Facing pushback from local colleges and lack of transparency allegations, Arizona College of Nursing’s CT campus in jeopardy

The Arizona College of Nursing signed a 30,000-square-foot lease in East Hartford last year with grand plans to open a Connecticut campus aimed at helping address the state’s nursing shortage.

But the for-profit school’s efforts to enter the Connecticut market could be on life support after a key regulatory agency recently vacated a partial approval of the plan, accusing the college of not being transparent about a voluntary consent agreement issued in the state of Arizona. That agreement outlined numerous student and faculty complaints about program quality at the college’s Tempe, Arizona campus.

Meantime, some Connecticut private colleges with nursing programs — including the University of St. Joseph and Sacred Heart University — have been actively trying to block the new competitor from entering the market, raising concerns to regulators about the lack of need for another nursing school when existing programs face challenges with faculty shortages and finding clinical placements for students.

A significant potential competitor — East Hartford-based Goodwin University, which has a major nursing program — filed a lawsuit against one of Arizona College’s top former new hires. In its federal lawsuit filed in August, Goodwin accuses one of its former enrollment directors, Daniel Williamson, of improperly downloading student recruitment data just prior to leaving the school for a new executive director of enrollment services role at Arizona College, court records show.

The Arizona College of Nursing confirmed to the Hartford Business Journal that Williamson was initially placed on leave pending an investigation, and now no longer works for the school.

Williamson’s attorneys, Gerald Pia Jr. and Brian Roche, didn’t respond to a request for comment.

The regulatory and legal dramas offer a window into the competitive world of higher education, where schools compete for students and top faculty talent. It’s also playing out as Connecticut faces a major nursing shortage that has left hospitals and other care providers short-staffed and in search of help.

For its part, the Arizona College of Nursing said it hopes to still move forward with plans to open a Connecticut campus, hinting that competitors are partially to blame for the regulatory stumbling blocks.

“At a time when everyone agrees Connecticut is facing a historic nursing shortage, it is disheartening that competing schools are seeking to delay approval of a new program that will graduate more nurses, many of whom are from disadvantaged backgrounds and underserved by existing schools,” said Arizona College of Nursing Chairperson Nick Mansour in a statement.

Consent agreement

The Arizona College of Nursing planned to open its Connecticut campus in an East Hartford office building at 99 East River Drive.

It has proposed to launch an accelerated three-year, 120-credit bachelor’s degree program similar to what it offers at its 12 other nursing school campuses in eight states. The Connecticut location would be the school’s first New England outpost.

In its application, Arizona College projected it would enroll upwards of 32 students in the first year, starting in May 2023, and about 285 pupils by the end of year five. The nursing school would offer both virtual and in-person classes and hire 18 new faculty over the next three years.

The college said it chose East Hartford for its diversity — 64% of its current student body is composed of students from ethnic and racial minority groups.

The nursing school, which was founded in 1991 and enrolls over 4,000 students, had been going through the Connecticut approval process, which it projected would take six to nine months.

In addition to the Office of Higher Education (OHE), it also needs approval from the Board of Examiners of Nursing (BOEN), which operates under the auspices of the Department of Public Health. That oversight board is where it recently hit a snag.

This summer, the BOEN approved parts of Arizona College’s application, including a feasibility study, letter of intent and self study, which entails plans for how the nursing school wants the college to run.

However, in several recent meetings, some nursing board members raised concerns about a voluntary probation consent agreement the school agreed to with the Arizona State Board of Nursing.

The consent agreement was signed in late May. The Connecticut nursing board voted to approve parts of Arizona College’s application in June, unaware of the school’s regulatory issues in another state, raising concerns from some board members about a lack of transparency.

The consent agreement said that between May 6, 2021 and Nov. 3, 2021, the Arizona State Board of Nursing received 14 complaints about Arizona College’s Tempe campus. Faculty and students alleged there was non-compliance with program policies and standards, a high number of program and course changes without adequate student notice, inadequate clinical faculty, and a decline in degree completion rates.

The probationary period for the voluntary consent agreement is 36 months.

At their Sept. 21 meeting, the Connecticut nursing examiners board voted 7-2 to revoke its previous approvals.

“The more I read, the more I see they were not transparent,” BOEN member Geraldine Marrocco said at the Sept. 21 meeting. “Probation is a sanction; they are not in good standing. There are undertones of mistrust I have with this institution. I’d expect them to be above board and they were not above board.”

Arizona College said it first notified a Connecticut Office of Higher Education official about the consent agreement during a July 13 site visit.

Some of the agreement’s complaints included that the school’s Tempe campus laid off 32 clinical faculty members without qualified replacements in August 2021, two weeks before the new semester, and that from Aug. 30 to Oct. 15, 2021, 19% of student clinical experiences were canceled primarily due to inadequate staffing. Another complaint said that for the fall 2021 term, nearly half of the 86 Tempe campus adjunct/clinical faculty members had no prior teaching experience.

Arizona College of Nursing said it takes the consent agreement findings “seriously” and is working to address them.

“Internal reviews and evaluations of each of the other campuses have shown that these issues were limited to the Tempe campus and do not exist at any of the other locations,” said Matthew Egan, Arizona College’s vice president of regulatory affairs. “There have been many lessons learned from this situation about closely monitoring faculty and faculty hiring as well as maintaining the integrity of the dean’s ability to administer the nursing program.”

Chris Boyle, a spokesperson for the state Department of Public Health (DPH), said the Sept. 21 BOEN vote does allow for the nursing school to resubmit its application for approval.

Arizona College said it still hopes to move forward with the regulatory process and open a Connecticut campus.

Default rates

Several competing Connecticut colleges with nursing programs — as well as the public Connecticut State Colleges & Universities system and Connecticut Conference of Independent Colleges — have expressed opposition to Arizona College coming into the state, citing concerns about competitive pressures or the consent agreement.

“A new program that will pull from the key resources we are working with to supplement the clinical placements, faculty and preceptors we need to assure we can meet the workforce demands of the state should not be supported or approved by the state,” Sacred Heart University President John Petillo wrote in a letter to the Office of Higher Education.

Several BOEN members do work for universities that have voiced opposition to Arizona College.

In another letter to the Office of Higher Education, the Connecticut Conference of Independent Colleges noted that Arizona College’s student loan default rates for the most recent years available are “much higher than the national average and more than triple the rates of most Connecticut public and private, nonprofit institutions.”

It provided data from the U.S. Department of Education, which showed Arizona College’s student loan default rates for fiscal years 2016 through 2018 were 23.2%, 21.3%, and 14%, respectively, compared to the national averages of 10.1%, 9.7% and 7.3%, for those same years.

The Arizona College noted that its student passage rates for licensing exams currently exceed the national and Connecticut averages and that its program will require no subsidy from state taxpayers.