California's minority majority and the White face of nursing

Of the 33 million people in California, the nation's most populous state, minority groups now constitute the majority of the population. Many sources predict that by 2060, the entire country will mirror the diversity of California today. Like the rest of the country, California is experiencing a critical shortage of nurses that is predicted to increase in the coming years, and California's nursing workforce does not represent the racial and ethnic diversity of the state's population as a whole. If the nursing profession is to thrive in the coming years, educators and leaders must create a way to embrace people from diverse ethnicities and cultures. The purposes of this article are to determine whether ethnic minority groups have different success rates in California nursing programs, whether nursing programs with high percentages of diverse students have differing success rates, and to describe the institutional predictors of on-time completion rates, attrition rates, and NCLEX-RN first-time pass rates in California community colleges.