From 2016 to 2024, Penn Nursing held the number one spot as the world’s leading nursing school — a distinction the school openly celebrates — and today continues to rank among the best programs in the world. That distinction is built not only on research and reputation, but on the clinical training that defines nursing education.
Clinical rotations are an essential component of the nursing curriculum. What distinguishes nursing from many other medical-related fields is its required immersion in clinical settings, offering nursing students vital opportunities to shadow healthcare professionals, prepare medications, and, of course, practice caring for patients — all of which endow nursing students with critical skills and insights needed for future independent practice.
B.S.N. students at Penn complete seven rotations at clinical sites throughout Greater Philadelphia during their undergraduate years. While some sites are conveniently located right next to campus, such as the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania or Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, other clinical placements have students traveling 10 miles over 20 minutes away, as early as 5:45 a.m. for many students, to promptly arrive for their 6:30 or 7 a.m. rotation.
While it’s no issue for registered nurses to commute early or far once they’re finally working, shouldn’t nursing students — who are already paying upwards of $90,000 per year in tuition — at least have their travels to and from clinical paid for by the University?
Penn Nursing explicitly states that students are responsible for arranging their own transportation to and from their clinical site and for covering the cost of travel. While the University does offer some exceptions to this policy, it’s only for select clinical sites, and they only subsidize the Lyft cost for students traveling in groups of two or more. If students can't abide by Penn’s strict criteria, they have to foot the bill themselves.
The out-of-pocket costs for Penn Nursing students are already exceptionally high. Students are expected to pay for a stethoscope, a wristwatch with a second hand, and multiple pairs of scrubs, embroidered with their name and the Penn Nursing logo, all on their own. Layering transportation costs onto these required expenses feels less like necessity and more like neglect.
Many nursing students echo this sentiment. Regarding transportation to and from clinical, Nursing junior Yiwen Zhan stated, “I don’t understand why we have to pay for transportation. We already have to pay for scrubs, textbooks, and stethoscopes, so the transportation fee just makes it worse.”
The costs of these needed items can easily exceed hundreds of dollars: a price all nursing students are expected to shoulder. Penn prides itself on professional preparation, yet fails to ensure that preparation is financially accessible to all.
SEE MORE FROM JOSHUA DAUGHERTY:
Nursing junior Endy Huynh added to this, arguing that subsidizing transportation would greatly improve the clinical experience. “I think there should be reimbursements overall, no matter how far or close the location is, because it makes it more accessible for us students to continue going to our schooling,” she shared. “What about people who are low-income? Having to pay for transportation, whether that be Uber or even SEPTA, makes it harder.”
While SEPTA does offer transit to some clinical sites, it is widely known to have significant reliability issues. Only about three-quarters of SEPTA bus routes meet the agency’s own standard of arriving on time at least 80 percent of the time. With clinical rotations having strict arrival times and fees totalling hundreds of dollars for showing up late, students literally cannot afford to take the inconsistent SEPTA and risk being late to clinical. And when it comes to safety, do you really want to take SEPTA at 5:30 in the morning? Yeah, me neither.
The prices of transportation to and from clinicals are not just one-time purchases, either. Nursing junior Claire Zhou says her average Uber ride just one way to her clinical at Belmont Behavioral Health is $20, which totals to around $40 for a single day of clinical. With senior nursing students having clinicals twice a week, that’s over $1,000 at the end of the semester that Penn won’t reimburse.
Perhaps Penn funding clinical transportation for every single nursing student is too much of an ask. I mean, surely a $24.8 billion endowment is way too little to accommodate nursing students’ travels, right? While I am not necessarily suggesting that it’s unreasonable for students within one clinical group to share an Uber or Lyft to their site together, it’s unacceptable for Penn to pick and choose which destinations are worthy of subsidizing when nursing students themselves can’t even choose their clinical placement site.
Regardless of the clinical site distance — whether as far as Einstein Medical Center or as close as Pennsylvania Hospital in Center City — transportation to and from clinical sites should be funded by Penn. Without proper funding, Penn is taking advantage of nursing students’ finances, when all they are looking for is an education.
JOSHUA DAUGHERTY is a Nursing sophomore from Farmington, CT. His email address is joshuacd@nursing.upenn.edu.
