Building a Culture That Keeps Nursing Students on Track

Every year, more than 200,000 nurses graduate and transition to clinical practice.¹ With so many successes, it’s easy to take for granted all the intentional support that turns those dreams into reality. What also happens each year? Tens of thousands of nursing students leave their nursing programs—oftentimes for good.¹ This is when the absence or failure of that support becomes impossible to ignore.

Student retention and remediation are essential, which is why successful nursing programs are built around cultures that make them a priority. These programs prioritize early intervention, personalized academic support, and continuous student outreach. Consequently, they are also the programs that most consistently turn aspiring professionals into practice-ready nurses.

Why? Because they understand that retention isn't the product of a single action, but the result of countless decisions that help students stay engaged, overcome challenges, and stay on track for graduation and long-term success.

The goal? Student retention. The first step? To get started before the struggle begins.

Get Started Before the Struggle

Like many things in life, student retention and remediation are influenced by timing. A flower won’t bloom before the right season. A leaky faucet is much easier to fix before it floods inside the room. And a struggling student won’t respond to outreach if it’s already too late. In fact, research shows that “identifying students once they have already begun to disengage may have limited value in preventing attrition.”²

The best retention efforts start early—really early. Academic failure is often the result of personal challenges over weeks or even months at a time. Since nursing education is cumulative, small knowledge gaps can evolve into much larger obstacles before there’s time to react.

Successful programs focus on identifying risk long before it manifests itself in course grades or progression reports. They look for early indicators of struggle, including performance trends, engagement patterns, and signs of academic disengagement.

Of course, early identification alone is not enough. Students must also have access to the support they need once those identifications take place, and they must cultivate a sense of belonging with their fellow students.³ That's why it's essential to implement interventions early, before struggling students fall too far behind or disengage from the community altogether.

Create Multiple Pathways to Success

Identifying which students are at risk is only the beginning. The next challenge is establishing a realistic path forward for each student.

Students leave nursing programs for many reasons. Some struggle academically. Some face financial pressures, family responsibilities, or a lack of overall confidence. Often, attrition results from a mix of personal, academic, and environmental factors, making one-size-fits-all solutions difficult to implement and ultimately unsuccessful.

Effective retention cultures focus less on finding a single answer and more on creating multiple pathways to success. When students encounter obstacles, they need options, and these options should be a system of support with enough diversity to meet their individual needs.

The most supportive retention cultures understand that success looks different for each student. Some students need this. Some students need that. And some students need a combination of both.

Research suggests that offering multiple pathways to success can make academic interventions more meaningful and more successful in the long term.¹ When programs create options for students, obstacles become more manageable, and students are more likely to stay on track for graduation.

The Importance of Belonging

Studies show an employee’s perception of organizational support is of utmost importance.⁴ It’s directly linked to job satisfaction, general well-being, and long-term commitment. In nursing education specifically, increased organizational support has a notable impact on turnover intention, meaning the general likelihood that a student will turn away from even the possibility of nursing.⁵

Simply put, it’s important for an aspiring nurse to feel like they belong. Programs can facilitate this sense of community in several ways, such as peer-to-peer mentoring, meaningful faculty support, targeted social initiatives, and collaborative learning opportunities. When students feel actively engaged in their programs, they are much more likely to be successful in the long term.

The Importance of Data

Strong retention systems demand robust data—data banks, data-driven decisions, and AI-enhanced data analysis. Such insights allow nurse educators to identify at-risk students quickly. Faculty and administrators can see patterns that might otherwise have gone unnoticed.

A missed assignment, declining assessment scores, or a drop in engagement may seem insignificant in isolation. However, when viewed together, these signals can reveal a student who is quietly moving toward disengagement.
Robust data reporting also makes it possible for faculty to review student performance in real time and respond with highly personalized remediation resources. What’s more, this data analysis makes it possible to measure the effectiveness of retention efforts and continuously refine them over time.

The Importance of Finding the Right Partnership

Building a culture of retention requires the right systems, the right insights, and the right support structure. That's why so many nursing programs turn to partners with vast libraries of data-driven resources. When institutions combine strong retention strategies with industry-leading solutions from a trusted partner, they are better positioned to improve retention, strengthen student outcomes, and graduate more practice-ready nurses.

Putting Retention Culture Into Action

Building a culture of retention is one thing. Seeing it in action is another. For many nursing programs, ATI has helped transform retention from a goal into a measurable outcome, creating stronger support systems for both students and faculty.

According to Adam Munroe, MSN, BSN, ADN, Program Chair at Massachusetts Bay Community College, it’s a big success:

“What I like most about being a Complete Partner is the resources and the commitment that ATI has made to us — the support staff, the integration team, the subject matter experts — that has allowed us to streamline our processes, evaluate data, and provide students with a package that promotes their various learning styles.”

According to Katy Trotty, EdD, MSN, BSN, Associate Professor at Stephen F. Austin University, it’s transformational:

“[After ATI interventions], the culture of our department is one in which students feel safe to approach faculty, and faculty are invested in supporting students who are willing to put the effort in to learn.”

ATI and a Culture of Student Retention

Retention isn’t accomplished with a single policy or piece of technology. It's the result of a certain type of educational culture, and culture building is a comprehensive endeavor.

It requires much more than assessments and remediation. Complete partnerships with ATI provide an entire ecosystem to deliver student success, including responsive support teams, implementation expertise, and consulting services.

ATI helps nursing programs turn retention strategies into lasting results. With a combination of assessments, learning resources, and AI-powered support, ATI equips educators to identify risk early, support students more effectively, and foster cultures where more future nurses can graduate and become healthcare heroes.

References

1. Sheikoleslami RL, Princeton DM, Hansen LIM, Kisa S, Goyal AR. Examining factors associated with attrition, strategies for retention among undergraduate nursing students, and identified research gaps: a scoping review. Nursing Reports. 2025;15(6):182. doi: 10.3390/nursrep15060182
2. American Association of Colleges of Nursing. Schools of Nursing See Enrollment Increases Across Most Program Levels, Signaling Strong Interest in Nursing Careers. May 7, 2026. https://www.aacnnursing.org/news-data/all-news/article/schools-of-nursing-see-enrollment-increases-across-most-program-levels-signaling-strong-interest-in-nursing-careers-1480
3. American Association of Colleges of Nursing. Fact Sheet: Nursing Faculty Shortage. https://www.aacnnursing.org/Portals/0/PDFs/Fact-Sheets/Faculty-Shortage-Factsheet.pdf
4. Bureau of Labor Statistics, US Department of Labor. Registered Nurses. Occupational Outlook Handbook. https://www.bls.gov/ooh/healthcare/registered-nurses.htm
5. Spector N, Silvestre J, McIntosh Q, Kaminski-Ozturk N. National Nursing Education Database: 2023–2024 Aggregate Data. National Council of State Boards of Nursing; June 2025. https://www.ncsbn.org/public-files/2023-2024-AggregateData-digital-v2.pdf
6. American Association of Colleges of Nursing. New AACN Data Points to Enrollment Challenges Facing U.S. Schools of Nursing. April 15, 2024. https://www.aacnnursing.org/news-data/all-news/article/new-aacn-data-points-to-enrollment-challenges-facing-us-schools-of-nursing
7. ATI Nursing Education. Data collected in a survey of faculty in ATI-supported nursing education programs, March to November 2024.  
8. Park EO, Chang K, Koduah S. Structured Assessments: Enhancing Success in Early Nursing Education and Student Retention. Nursing Reports. 2025;15(9):335. doi:10.3390/nursrep15090335
9. Fooladi E, Karim MN, Vance S, Walker L, Zanjani ME, Ilic D, Brand G. Factors Associated With Undergraduate Nursing Students' Academic and Clinical Performance: A Mixed-Methods Study. Frontiers in Medicine. 2022;9. doi: 10.3389/fmed.2022.793591
   
10. Jadhav RA, Parekh R. Literature Review on Early Intervention Strategies to Address Student Attrition With Predictive Analytics. International Journal of Creative Research Thoughts. 2025. https://ijcrt.org/papers/IJCRT2507276.pdf