A few years ago, fewer than two-thirds of South Plains College’s nursing graduates in Levelland, Texas were passing the NCLEX on their first try — Texas Board of Nursing records show first-time pass rates in the low 60s, well under the standard.¹
That’s not a statistic. That’s dozens of students a year who did the work, finished the program, and still couldn’t start their careers.
Then, in December 2023, the program’s graduating cohort passed at 100%.² The program credited a new curriculum and a rebuilt approach to NCLEX preparation — including bringing back a recently retired faculty member specifically to lead structured, rationale-based practice.²
The turnaround didn’t come from a different class of students or a bigger budget. It came from within the program — and it’s the same kind of change showing up in programs across the country that are climbing out of the danger zone.
This isn’t a one-off
South Plains isn’t a fluke, and it isn’t alone. A 2026 analysis by Nurse.org, built from state board and NCSBN data across 37 states, identified 57 nursing schools that went from below 75% first-time pass rates in 2021–22 to above 85% in 2024–25 — gains of 10 to nearly 37 percentage points, on candidate volumes large enough to rule out luck.³
These weren’t all small programs catching a good cohort. Several graduate more than 100 students a year. They span community colleges, regional public universities, and private nursing schools — ADN and BSN, in states from Michigan to Utah to Louisiana. The common thread isn’t the institution type. It’s what these programs did to recover.
The implication underneath all of it: a program’s past performance is not its destiny. A pass rate in the danger zone is a snapshot, not a sentence.
If you lead a program that’s below standard right now, that’s the part worth sitting with. Recovery isn’t rare. It’s documented, it’s repeatable, and 57 programs just did it.
What actually changed
So what do the turnarounds have in common? Not a product. Not a single heroic hire. The pattern is structural, and it shows up again and again.
Start with what broke these programs in the first place. South Plains’ documented low point came during a stretch of faculty turnover and a disruptive switch between instructional platforms — exactly the kind of instability that fractures a program’s consistency.³ That’s the tell. The programs that fell into the danger zone usually didn’t get there because their students got worse. They got there because something structural came loose: leadership churn, faculty turnover, a curriculum that drifted, preparation that got inconsistent.
Which means the recovery is structural too. The schools that climbed out share a recognizable set of moves: they stabilized their leadership and faculty so the program stopped resetting every year. They rebuilt the curriculum so that NCLEX readiness was woven through it, not bolted on as a panicked review at the end. And they put real student-support infrastructure in place, so the students who needed more had somewhere to get it.
This isn’t just a pattern I’ve observed. NCSBN’s own evidence-based quality indicators for nursing education programs name leadership stability as a key factor in program quality and student outcomes — a steady academic leader, supported from above, is what keeps curriculum, faculty development, and evidence-based practices consistently implemented over time.⁴ The thing that breaks programs and the thing that rebuilds them are two sides of the same factor.
None of that is glamorous. All of it is durable. That’s the difference between a program that spikes for one cohort and one that holds its gains for three years running, the way South Plains did.
Why the turnarounds happened now
There’s a timing detail in the data that matters, and it points straight at the deeper cause.
Nearly every featured turnaround improved starting in 2023 — the year the Next Generation NCLEX launched. Nationally, NCSBN reported first-time RN pass rates jumping from 79.9% in 2022 to 88.56% in 2023, then 91.2% in 2024.⁵ That’s not a coincidence. The NGN redesigned the exam around clinical judgment: not whether a student can recall a fact, but whether they can reason through a situation the way a safe nurse does at the bedside.
The programs that recovered were, overwhelmingly, the ones that rebuilt their teaching around that — around clinical judgment and critical thinking, not content cramming. When the exam started measuring thinking, the programs that taught thinking pulled ahead. The ones still teaching memorization-and-review stayed stuck.
That’s the through-line connecting every turnaround in this dataset: they stopped preparing students to recognize answers and started teaching them to reason. The structural fixes — stable leadership, integrated curriculum, real support — are what made that shift possible and made it stick.
What this means if your program is below standard
If you’re a Dean or director looking at a pass rate that’s keeping you up at night, here’s the honest version.
The good news is real: recovery happens, and it happens through changes that are within a program’s control. The 57 schools that turned around are proof — and many of them started from numbers worse than yours.
The harder news is that the fix isn’t a purchase. A test-prep contract bolted onto a destabilized program doesn’t address why the program is destabilized. The turnaround starts upstream — with an honest look at what came loose. Where did leadership or faculty continuity break? Where did the curriculum drift away from clinical judgment? Where are students falling through gaps that no one’s catching? The programs that recover are the ones that diagnose the structural problem first, then rebuild — rather than spending the year before the accreditation visit treating the symptom.
That diagnostic work — figuring out what’s actually destabilizing a program and rebuilding the structure that holds it steady — is the part I’m drawn to. Not just naming the danger zone, but mapping the way out of it.
Fifty-seven programs found that way out. The pattern they followed is knowable. And it starts with understanding that a failing pass rate was never really about the test.
If you’re staring at a pass rate that’s below standard and trying to figure out where to even start, that’s a lot of what I do — diagnosing what’s actually destabilizing a program, and helping rebuild what turns it around. You can start a conversation here.
References
- Texas Board of Nursing, NCLEX-RN® Examination Pass Rates for Professional Nursing Education Programs (five-year first-time pass-rate data, South Plains College). bon.texas.gov
- South Plains College, “South Plains College ADN program reports 100-percent NCLEX pass rate” (December 2023 cohort; new curriculum and rebuilt NCLEX preparation). southplainscollege.edu
- Nurse.org, “Nursing Programs With the Most Improved NCLEX Pass Rates” (2026) — analysis of state board and NCSBN data identifying 57 programs across 37 states that improved from below 75% (2021–22) to above 85% (2024–25). nurse.org
- Spector N, Silvestre J, Alexander M, et al. “NCSBN Regulatory Guidelines and Evidence-Based Quality Indicators for Nursing Education Programs.” Journal of Nursing Regulation. 2020;11(2):S1–S64 — leadership stability as a key factor in program quality and student outcomes. doi.org
- National Council of State Boards of Nursing (NCSBN), NCLEX Examination Statistics — national first-time RN pass rates: 79.9% (2022), 88.56% (2023), 91.2% (2024). ncsbn.org