Nursing students at NYU are no longer required to pay a $150 fee for missing clinical practice sessions, according to the university. The change comes after a student-led petition calling for the fee to be waived gained hundreds of signatures.
At the Rory Meyers College of Nursing, students are expected to participate in on and off-campus clinical courses, which provide students with hands-on experience that fulfills state-mandated clinical hour requirements. Last year, students had to pay a $150 absence fee when they missed a session to cover the cost of scheduling mandatory makeup sessions. Rachel Harrison, a spokesperson for Rory Meyers, said the university communicated the revised policy to students in August.
“NYU Meyers leadership met in the spring to review the college’s policies for clinical absences and two deans later met with nursing students to hear their concerns and suggestions,” Harrison wrote in a statement to WSN. “Following these conversations, NYU Meyers leadership decided to revise the clinical absence policies, including eliminating the absence fee and implementing new processes to streamline off-campus makeup sessions by scheduling planned makeup dates for the semester.”
In March, Rory Meyers alum Julian Mohammed created a petition calling for the school to reconsider the fee — including in cases of COVID-19-related absences — garnering hundreds of signatures. Mohammed also discussed the fee with former Rory Meyers dean Eileen Sullivan-Marx and associate dean of the school’s undergraduate program Selena Gilles. On the day of his graduation this past May, Sullivan-Marx told Mohammed that the fee would no longer be enforced.
“For clinicals, a lot of the times we can get sick or even have things going on at home, but people would still come in and we still have to take care of patients and take care of patients for 10 hours straight,” Mohammed said. “It’s a lot, so I am hoping this will let students — if they need the day off — take the day off if they need it and just take care of themselves.”
Rory Meyers junior Magdiel Sanchez, who is attending the program on a scholarship, said he signed the petition out of frustration with how the fee requirement could impact his financial security.
“It honestly scared me to enter clinical sequence because I am always someone who is extremely sick; I suffer from asthma. So, there are some days where my asthma is really bad, and I can’t even leave the house,” Sanchez said. “I haven’t had to miss a clinical because my health has been great this semester, but $150 is a lot of money — it is probably groceries for three weeks in New York City, so it probably would have put me at risk of sacrificing a meal to pay that fee.”
Contract Adrianna Nehme at [email protected].
