Nurses Are Divided Over the Nightingale Lawsuit: 5 Arguments From 700+ Comments

When Nurse.org covered the lawsuit Nightingale College filed against the California Board of Registered Nursing, the response was immediate: more than 750 comments across social media and the article itself, thousands of reactions, and thousands of shares within days. Graduates defended their education. Working nurses split between backing the board and calling its scrutiny overreach.

And no party escaped suspicion: commenters questioned the motives of the board, the school, California’s own programs, and us.

What is clear: nurses are not actually arguing about one question. They are arguing about many, but five dominate, and on several of them, the public record can referee. Nurse.org also interviewed a current Nightingale student and a 2024 graduate for this piece, and sent questions to both the board and Nightingale; both acknowledged them, and neither had provided answers by publication. Here is what the record supports, what it does not, and where honest disagreement remains. 

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One of the most-liked comments on Instagram, with hundreds of likes, was seven words of advice: “ALWAYS CHECK BEFORE YOU START A PROGRAM!!!” A veteran nurse on Facebook made the longer version of the argument: decades ago, she checked accreditation and program pass rates before enrolling, and any prospective nurse should do the same.

Graduates pushed back hard, and on the facts, they have a point. “It’s FULLY ACCREDITED,” one wrote. “We did our research,” wrote another. A current student weeks from graduating put it bluntly in an interview: “We did. We called. We reread every page, and it’s right on their website.”

They are right: Nightingale, a Utah-based institution, is institutionally accredited; its BSN program is accredited by the Commission on Collegiate Nursing Education; and the board approved 1,961 of its graduates for California licensure before the holds began, according to Nightingale’s complaint. A student who checked every box a reasonable person would check in 2023 would have found an accredited program whose graduates were being licensed in California.

Both camps are describing something true. Due diligence matters, and it also was not enough here, because the thing that changed was not the school’s credentials. What changed was the board’s handling of Nightingale applications: after years of approvals, the holds began in May 2026. The board’s position is that it is enforcing standards that were always there; the college’s is that the board changed the rules without lawfully adopting them. Either way, no pre-enrollment checklist catches it.

Three words keep getting used interchangeably in the comments, and they are not interchangeable.

• Accreditation means independent accreditors vetted the program’s quality. Nightingale is accredited.
• Approval is a state board’s authorization. California’s board approves only California programs; it has no approval relationship with any out-of-state school.
• Equivalency is how out-of-state graduates get licensed. Each applicant asks the board to find their education equivalent to what California requires of its own programs, and the board judges that when the application is filed.

So the commenters saying “it’s accredited” are correct, the commenters saying “it was never board-approved” are also correct, and neither settles anything, because the lawsuit is about the third thing: which standards the board can use when making the equivalency call. An out-of-state student applies, pays, and studies for years, and the board judges their education when the licensure application is filed, after graduation. Whatever a student verifies at enrollment, there is no way to lock in how their education will be judged on the other end.

The Advice That Worked in 2021 and Stopped Working in May

The most-liked practical advice in the comments: test in another state, then transfer the license into California by endorsement. Even nursing educators suggested the route. And for years, it worked. “I tested in NV did Cali endorsement with no issue,” wrote one 2021 Nightingale graduate. Another 2021 graduate described the same route.

Then graduates whose applications are on hold replied in the same threads. “We can’t do any of those options,” an April 2026 graduate wrote. “They review the school you attended and BRN is blocking us from CA endorsement & temp RN license.” Another said she is testing in Nevada anyway, but “the BRN is holding endorsement apps too.” Several more graduates confirmed the same mechanics in replies. Nightingale’s complaint alleges it as well: endorsement applications from previously licensed Nightingale nurses are also on hold.

Nurse.org sent questions to both the board and Nightingale. Both acknowledged the questions, but neither provided answers by publication.

The mechanics matter for anyone tempted by the workaround. Endorsement transfers a license, not an education. California reviews the applicant’s original nursing education when they endorse in, so a Nevada license does not cure a California education question. Testing elsewhere can still make sense, several graduates said they are doing it to start working in other states, but by their accounts it is currently a route around California, not into it.

Two claims collided in the comments, and both camps were working from memory. The most-reacted comment on Facebook, from a graduate: “there has never been any complaints about Nightingale college students not passing the boards, everyone I know passed the first time.” A few replies down, another graduate corrected her own side: the program’s first-time pass rate runs “anywhere between 50 to 60%.” The first graduate did not budge: “everyone I know passed the first time, that is accurate.”

The public record splits the difference. Here is what first-time NCLEX-RN results published by the Utah Division of Occupational and Professional Licensing, the program’s home-state regulator, show for Nightingale’s BSN program:

Source: first-time NCLEX-RN pass rates in DOPL data published by the Utah Division of Occupational and Professional Licensing, the program’s home-state regulator.

2025 was both the program’s largest testing cohort and a declining year, falling from 72.0% to 63.0%. It was not alone: first-time pass rates fell nationwide in 2025.

Sources: DOPL statewide totals for the Utah rows and NCSBN for the national row.

So the graduate who said 50 to 60% was not inventing it: that was roughly the program’s range in 2021 and 2022.

Those figures cover the program’s first-time candidates wherever they seek licensure, so they are national for the program, not California-specific, and they largely predate the holds.

But pass rates are not what this lawsuit is about: the board’s stated concerns are clinical-hour requirements, and the legal question Nightingale has put before the court is whether those requirements were lawfully adopted, which no pass rate answers.

The numbers complicate “everyone passes” and they equally complicate “diploma mill.” They describe a program that improved sharply through 2024, slipped in 2025 as pass rates did nationally, and sits at the center of a fight about something else.

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One graduate described the program’s virtual clinical component in detail. In her account, students receive assignments in a virtual reality environment: “we get an assignment where we use our virtual reality headsets and we go in and we take care of the patient.” The patient is simulated, she said, with a chart to review and a condition to identify; students can repeat the assessment “multiple times” until they get “the grade that we want,” then debrief the case each week in an hour-long group session with an instructor. Another student, who later withdrew from the program, described the same mechanics in a comment on our original report: VR completed alone, followed by a weekly hour discussing the virtual patient with an instructor. 

By her account of a board meeting, virtual care counts when it involves a real patient, a real physician, and a real chart; simulation with a fictional patient does not. Part of that is on the record: the board has told students that VR simulation time cannot count toward California’s 500-hour direct patient care requirement. Nightingale, for its part, told ABC 10News San Diego it has never claimed VR simulation counts toward the 500 hours, calling it a separate category of training.

The people who took the program describe it differently from each other, too. The current Nightingale student told Nurse.org the VR sessions were exactly what the school says: “that is not our clinical hours or our clinical teaching. That is supplemental learning.” Her hands-on rotations, she said, included hospital placements in other states. But the 2024 graduate, who passed the NCLEX on his first attempt and now works as an ER nurse in California, remembered it the other way, while allowing he “could be incorrect”: “I want to say that they stated that it was going to be part of our clinical hours.” Students and graduates of the same program do not agree on what the school counted.

Nurses split on that distinction. “Textbooks and modules can teach you the why, but only real-world, hands-on clinical practice under the weight of actual responsibility can truly forge the how,” wrote one nurse navigator on LinkedIn. A Texas-educated RN pointed the other way: COVID-era cohorts trained heavily on simulation “and they are excellent,” and, she argued, a controlled simulation can sometimes teach fundamentals better than a chaotic, understaffed unit. And in the comments on our original report, one commenter staked out the middle ground: a well-designed simulation aligned with national best practices “can certainly count” toward direct patient care hours, “but within reason,” since nothing replaces the unpredictability of face-to-face care.

One working California RN rejected the premise altogether: “The NCLEX is the NCLEX. If you pass then you should be competent to work.” That is not how licensing works: a board must approve an applicant’s education before it authorizes them to test, and passing the exam does not replace that review. That order is why these graduates are in limbo.

One nursing workforce and policy commenter put the board-side frame plainly: the BRN sits under the Department of Consumer Affairs because its mandate is public protection, not advocacy for the profession.

Buried in the arguments is more agreement than either side admits. The same Texas-educated RN proposed the compromise outright: let affected graduates complete a reduced block of clinical hours rather than repeat semesters, and “the board must also LEGALLY adopt the new rules they are enforcing.” A nurse practitioner who described feeling deeply for the affected students added a broader question: “we need to explore why students choose programs like this and how quality nursing education can be made more accessible.”

The comments themselves answer part of her question. California LVNs described lotteries, waitlists, expiring prerequisites, and no evening options for working students, and one wrote that she was about to enroll at Nightingale herself; another said she is already enrolled and praying it works out.

And the affected graduates themselves keep saying a version of the same thing. One affected student put it directly: “WE WANT TO TEST. We want to become nurses. If California determines that we need additional clinical hours to meet its requirements, then give us a pathway to complete them. We’ll do the hours if we must. Just give current students a fair path forward.” Almost nobody in 750+ comments argues that standards should drop. The fight is over process, notice, and who pays for the gap.

The current student said the same in her interview: “If it’s simply missing some clinical hours, call it out. Tell us what we need, and we’ll do it. But why is this dragging out?” What students get instead, she said, is a loop: the board tells them the school has not provided everything it asked for, and the school points them back to the board. “We don’t know who to be mad at.”

Several commenters conflated this story with Operation Nightingale, the federal investigation launched in 2023 into now-closed Florida schools that sold fraudulent nursing diplomas. The two are unrelated. Nightingale College is an accredited Utah-based institution whose graduates completed its program; the dispute with California is about which curriculum standards apply to that education, not whether it happened.

The mix-up is easy to make: the operation was named for Florence Nightingale, and even the California board’s own alert about the Florida scheme sits on a webpage carrying the Nightingale name, so a search for the college alongside the board can surface a fraud case that has nothing to do with it.

What Happens Next

Several commenters expect answers soon, and the calendar offers two dates. The board’s next full public meeting is September 24-25 in Sacramento; commenters anticipate Nightingale on the agenda, though we could not find an agenda posted for that meeting yet. And in court, Nightingale can file a standard preliminary injunction motion at any time, which could put the dispute back before a judge well before the case’s routine July 2027 conference date.

Until then, the graduates wait, and the commenters will keep arguing. The next chance for answers comes September 24-25 in Sacramento. Nurse.org will report on any updates from the board’s meeting.

🤔 What would a fair path forward look like for the graduates caught in the middle? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

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