Bachelor Degree versus Associate Degree

So, Why? The reason why this is the million dollar question is because one will not know until they are at the next level. For that reason I referred to my husband who has an advance degree in nursing. He graduated more than twenty years ago with an associate degree and went on to obtain a bachelor degree so after. He stated that when “he was in school the pending threat was that Associate Degree Nurses (ADNs) will be phased out in the future.” For that reason he went on to obtain his bachelor. However, as the years passed he realized that time was repeating itself and nurses over the decades were being told year after year ADNs will be phased out. But it was both far from the truth but gradually becoming a reality.
In the book, Nursing Against the Odds, Susan Gordon identified that in the 1990’s nursing was under attack through the establishment of the managed care system. She stated that “many hospitals responded with cuts and restructuring plans that drastically increased the workloads of individual nurses, even as the cost pressures also meant the average hospital patient was sicker and the average stay shorter, so the patient actually needed far more care.” Now my husband a 1992 graduate confirmed this by identifying working on a 44 bed cardiac post-open heart unit with only four registered nurses and two licensed practical nurses each shift. The nurse to patient ratio was 10:1 with a medication nurse. At that time he thought how a system would ever mandate bachelor degrees when he felt that nurses were only there as technical individuals and not specialized.
Now I, being a more recent graduate can only relate with my husband on one level and that is that we both graduated from an associate degree program initially. Many nurses state that associate degree nurses are better prepared to care for the patients at the