Length of professional education of paramedics and nurses at community colleges in the Northeast United States

Paramedics in the US are less likely to hold a college degree than registered nurses. According to the National Registry of Emergency Medical Technicians' (NREMT) National Longitudinal EMTs Attributes and Demographics Study (LEADS ll), 43% of paramedics reported that their highest level of education was ‘some college’, 21% reported an associate's degree, and 23% reported a bachelor's degree (NREMT, 2014). In contrast, in 2008, 13.9% of registered nurses held a non-degree diploma (down from 55% in 1980), 36.1% held an associate's degree, and 36.8% held a bachelor's degree (American Association of Colleges of Nursing (AACN), 2011) (See Table 1). While both paramedics and registered nurses undergo professional education programmes totalling over 1 000 hours in order to attain basic mastery of each profession's body of knowledge—and this basic mastery is assessed both by the college and externally, through passing a state licensing exam in order to practice—the dominant model of nursing education has clearly shifted away from a certificate model and toward a degree-based model over the past few decades (AACN, 2011).