In 1938, Arizona State College reached an agreement with the state's four hospital schools to accept 16 semester hours of credit toward degree requirements for work completed at these schools by students who went on to earn the Registered Nurse's Certificate. Both a pre-nursing program and a degree curriculum were established at ASC in 1944. The degree program was designed to be completed in 5 years, half of which were spent at ASC and half at a hospital in Phoenix. Students graduated with both a B.S. and a Registered Nurse's Certificate. A four-year course was introduced in 1957 and the College of Nursing was established in 1964. A masters program was added in 1968 and the program established the Participatory Educational Project at the Community Health Services Clinic in Scottsdale in 1971.
As the hospital schools' nursing programs closed in the late 1960s, ASU's program expanded and a number of innovative curricular plans were introduced. Enrollment limits were set in 1973 in order to avoid oversaturating the field with recent graduates, expand graduate level programming, and allow practicing nurses to return to school to learn about the most recent techniques. During the rest of the decade, the undergraduate curriculum was supplemented with numerous extension courses offered to such audiences as school nurses and practicing nurses. In the 1990s, the undergraduate program was further expanded and a doctoral program introduced. The unit's name was later changed to College of Nursing and Healthcare Innovation and today it continues to strive to remain at the forefront of nursing education.
From the guide to the Preliminary Inventory of the College of Nursing Records, 1957-2005, (Arizona State University Libraries University Archives)
