Yeidy de la Rosa’s patient is not actually real.
The mannequin she's treating lies on a medical bed in a hospital room — that also isn’t a hospital room. It is, however, furnished like one, with a heart monitor and oxygen tank.
“I’m gonna go ahead and start a new set of vitals, just to see where your baseline is right now,” de la Rosa, a nursing student at Hudson Valley Community College, tells her patient.
It’s the first spring semester class for students enrolled in the nursing clinic seminar at the Troy college. De la Rosa and two of her classmates are walking through a scenario to practice how they would react to it in real life.
Instructor Sarah Kownack sits in the other room, acting as the patient and talking to them over a speaker system. It doesn’t take the team long to figure out that the “patient” is in respiratory distress. De la Rosa makes a call to the doctor, who Kownack also plays, asking if they have a greenlight to give the patient more oxygen — exactly the solution they should arrive at. But when the group veers into a tangent by starting an unnecessary assessment, Kownack comes into the room to cut them off.
“You guys were so deep and so intense into that, that I knew I lost you,” Kownack said.
But Kownack tells the group that, all in all, she was pleased with their work.
“What do I teach you all the time? Treat your patient, not the monitor,” she said. “And I think that you guys did a really good job taking all of that into account.”
Those skills are already proving helpful to de la Rosa, who’s working at the Albany Medical Center on top of attending school as an adult learner.
“This is going to be a real-life scenario at some point, you know,” she said. “So it's going to be on our hands to make sure that the patients are safe.”
De la Rosa wants to get to that point as soon as possible: She spent years of her career as a medical assistant and behind a desk for a health insurance company — instead of with patients — because she doubted she was “competent enough” for nursing. But when she saw how staff shortages during the pandemic put a strain on hospitals, she felt a calling to serve patients herself.
Hochul's proposal
About a quarter of students at community colleges in the State University of New York — or SUNY — system are adult learners like de la Rosa, who often scale down their work hours so they can pursue a degree and advance their careers, all while raising children and paying off loans.
And New York Gov. Kathy Hochul wants to take the load off those adults who are heading into fields with intensifying staff shortages or burgeoning growth by covering books and tuition for their associate degrees.
As part of her 2025-26 state budget, Hochul’s proposal would support people between the ages of 25 to 55 who are enrolled at a community college within the State University of New York system (SUNY) and plan to enter fields that the Department of Labor has recognized as high-demand ones, such as teaching, nursing, engineering, technology and manufacturing. According to the Office of the State Comptroller, Hochul is calling for $28.2 million to go to SUNY schools and $18.8 million to schools in the City University of New York system.
“We will pick up the tab for you because that is an investment that will earn multiple times over,” Hochul said at a news conference in January at Onondaga Community College (OCC) in Syracuse.
De la Rosa said it didn't ever cross her mind that any aspect of her education would be free. She made the decision to enroll at Hudson Valley well before Hochul announced her proposal in January, and it wasn’t an easy one to make. She and her partner are supporting their two children, and all of them either have student loans or are currently in school. On top of her job at the hospital, the everyday tasks of life – like getting around to her car’s unreliable ignition switch – can bog de la Rosa down at times.
“When I made the decision to go into the nursing field, I had to really figure out, you know, where my priorities are, how I'm going to be able to make it and, you know, I held on for dear life,” de la Rosa said. “And I'm like, ‘Well, if this is the path for me, you know, I know I'm going to do it somehow.’”
If it survives budget negotiations, Hochul's proposal would kick into effect in the 2025-26 academic year and it would cover the remaining amount of schooling left for qualifying students who began their degree program prior to that. De la Rosa said even that partial assistance is welcome.
“That money can definitely free up a lot of stress, mentally and physically and emotionally as well,” she said.
Filling gaps in the workforce
Hochul's proposal comes at a time when the state has been keen to get in on lucrative industries in tech and manufacturing. The governor held her announcement in Syracuse, where semiconductor company Micron plans to invest up to $100 billion to build a manufacturing facility in the area, which was made possible by the 2022 national CHIPS and Science Act. Micron says its work would bolster the New York tech corridor, and its employees would come from upstate universities like OCC.
“Whether it’s young people, adults, veterans who are looking to come into the semi-conductor industry, the community college system is going to be a really important pathway and pipeline,” said Bo Machayo, head of U.S. government and public affairs for Micron. “The technician workforce is going to be largely made up of a lot of community college graduates.”
The proposal could have a widespread effect: SUNY Chancellor John King said initial projections suggest thousands of students would qualify and benefit from the tuition assistance program.
“This will be the ticket for adult learners who maybe have been struggling at their job. They're not making enough, they're trying to figure out what they want to do, but they're really interested in technology,” King said. “This could be the ticket for them to pursue that associate's degree.”
‘This is actually going to get me a job’
The proposed program would be open to adult students who started a college degree but didn’t finish out the program. Falling under that umbrella is Fallon Schulman, who’s studying advanced manufacturing at Hudson Valley. On the same day de la Rosa had her first nursing clinic of the semester, Schulman stood for an eight-hour lab session using heavy duty machines to make appliance parts. She said she can keep going for longer.
“Those mills that you have on the other side of the room, those will take a finger off if you look away,” she said before pointing at a lathe. “This thing will turn you into spaghetti.”
She started a physics degree a decade and a half ago at the University of Buffalo. But for her, it wasn’t the right time to attend school.
“I didn't really know what I was doing, and I did not have the discipline that's required to succeed in college,” she said. “No one was there to hold my hand.”
Schulman became a freelance artist, taking commissions for her 3D artwork and gigs when they came up. But with the encouragement of friends, she signed up for the associate degree program in manufacturing.
“It sounds silly to say the first time I was in college prepared me for the second time, but the opportunity to do so has been huge,” Schulman said.
Now at Hudson Valley, Schulman said she has supportive and well-connected teachers who can guide her through those long lab days.
“I feel like I'm in a Looney Tunes cartoon sometime where I'm just pulling levers and pushing buttons,” she said.
Schulman said the manufacturing degree program is perfect for her: She can use the same machines she’s learning about in class to fabricate her artwork and can fall back to a more standard manufacturing job if she needs to.
“This is actually going to get me a job,” Schulman said. “This is actually going to make me money. This is going to secure my future.”
But some students won’t qualify
Jen Crawford made a similar switch to STEM after spending more than 20 years teaching art in public schools.
“I've always kind of had this back and forth with trying to decide between engineering and art and math,” she said. “And I've always told my son, like, ‘Choose engineering.’”
She did not heed that advice for herself, until the public school she had last taught at told her weeks before the academic year started that she would be teaching a reduced number of classes. The school told Crawford that there were program cuts.
Crawford had known working in the arts wouldn’t be the most lucrative career path. But the news from the school along with the piling bills prompted Crawford to pivot.
“It just clicked,” she said. “I just heard my advice to my son and decided to follow it for myself.”
When she called Monroe Community College’s admissions office in Brighton later that summer, she told a recruiter that she always felt torn between a life in the arts and the worlds of math and science.
The recruiter suggested: How about the optics program?
For Crawford, learning about lens mechanics and making the devices herself has proven to be the perfect blend of her interests. Her courses are teaching her about the same technology that NASA, Apple and other high-tech companies use.
While Crawford, like the other students, is pursuing an associate’s degree to make a career switch, she doesn’t qualify for the governor’s program. That's because she received undergraduate and master’s degrees — in art — and the proposal in its current iteration would not support adult learners who have completed degrees in the past.
She said that doesn’t make sense. In her eyes, the program “would also be great for people who have gotten a degree, but their degree didn’t serve them or the degree is obsolete.”
In some ways, that’s how she feels about her own art degrees.
In the meantime, Crawford said she’s going to look for other scholarships.
“Because my tuition is on my credit card.”
