The American Association of Colleges of Nursing publishes an annual count of qualified applications turned away. In data released in May 2026, that figure reached 93,176 for the 2025-2026 academic year, the highest ever recorded. Two years earlier it was around 63,000. That is roughly thirty thousand additional rejections in a single biennium.
The Florida Center for Nursing’s Florida Health Care Workforce Projections 2022-2037 found that registered nurse supply growth is on track to closely match demand, holding statewide RN adequacy near 93% by 2037. The RN pipeline is improving. Schools expanded, enrollment rose, and the profession is producing nurses at a rate the state has not managed in years.
Located in a Class A building on the Delray Medical Center campus, Cambridge pairs hospital-adjacent clinical placement with an ACEN-accredited Associate of Science in Nursing program and a credential ladder that reaches the nurse practitioner level.
The Test of Essential Academic Skills is the pre-admission assessment most U.S. nursing programs use to judge whether an applicant has the academic foundation to survive a clinical curriculum. The current version is TEAS 7. It does not test nursing. It tests whether you can read carefully under time pressure, do arithmetic and algebra without panicking, remember enough biology and chemistry to build on, and write in standard English.
If you have spent any time researching nursing programs, you have read the generic success story: an unnamed student, a stock photograph, an arc with no friction in it. It proves nothing, because it describes no one. The reader knows this, which is why it does not work.
LPNs provide direct, hands-on nursing care under the direction of registered nurses and physicians. Depending on the setting and the state’s scope of practice rules, that typically includes monitoring and recording vital signs, wound care and dressing changes, catheter care, administering certain medications, assisting with personal care and mobility, collecting specimens, documenting patient status, and communicating changes in condition up the care team.
An Associate of Science in Nursing is a two-year college degree built around one job: preparing you to practice safely as an entry-level registered nurse. The coursework is dense and unglamorous in the best way, anatomy and physiology, microbiology, pharmacology, nursing fundamentals, medical-surgical nursing, maternal and newborn care, pediatrics, and mental health nursing paired with supervised clinical hours in real healthcare facilities.
For the students who enrolled in Cambridge’s Atlanta nursing program over the past two years, there has been a question running quietly underneath every exam, every skills check-off and every clinical shift: when will this program be fully accredited? The program was a candidate. Candidates are on the path. They have not yet arrived.
Maybe you are a CNA who has spent enough shifts beside RNs to know you can do their job. Maybe you are an LPN, a paramedic or a respiratory therapist who has hit the ceiling of your current license. Or maybe you are thirty-four, working in retail or logistics, and you have decided that the next decade of your life is going to mean something different.
Every nursing applicant eventually arrives at the same question, usually somewhere between the tuition page and the class schedule: will this program actually get me licensed, hired, and moving forward? It is the right question, and accreditation is where the answer starts.
1-877-206-4279