$27M gift leads to name change for Penn State’s College of Nursing. Here’s what the donation will do
Thanks to a “transformative” gift of more than $25 million, Penn State’s College of Nursing is getting a name change.
Longtime PSU supporters Ross and Carol Nese recently pledged $27.125 million to the college, prompting the university’s board of trustees to unanimously vote Thursday to change the college’s formal name to the “Ross and Carol Nese College of Nursing.” A naming ceremony will take place in August.
It is the largest-ever gift to the College of Nursing and the second-largest single commitment in Penn State’s history for an academic unit.
“Penn State is deeply grateful to Ross and Carol for their remarkably generous and timely gift,” university President Eric Barron said in a written statement. “There is no better way for us to fulfill our land-grant mission of serving the public good than to prepare new nurses to join that critical workforce — and the Neses’ gift will allow the College of Nursing to dramatically increase the number of health-care professionals who graduate from Penn State each year, prepared to meet the needs of patients and communities.”
Laurie Badzek, the college’s dean who referred to the gift as “transformative,” said the donation would allow the number of PSU nurses entering the profession over the next decade to increase by a minimum of 20%. (Prior to the gift, more than 5,000 bachelor’s-prepared nurses were set to join the workforce over the next decade.)
Here’s how the gift is broken down:
- $10.5 million: Additional graduate and undergraduate scholarships and fellowships
- $10 million: Support for significant facility renovations to the building at University Park
- $6.2 million: Faculty and academic programming
- $400,000: Seed funding for new ideas for teaching, research, outreach and entrepreneurial endeavors
Ross Nese, who lives in Pittsburgh, is a founder and board member of Grane Healthcare, which manages long-term care facilities throughout the commonwealth.
The College of Nursing operates and oversees programs at a dozen Penn State campuses, seven of which offer bachelor’s degrees, plus the online World Campus. (Nursing students typically spend at least a year doing clinical rotations in Hershey.) The Neses’ gift is expected to impact all of those programs.
“Ross and Carol have been strong supporters of the college for many years, and they have always given quietly, refusing public recognition. This speaks to their incredible humility as well as to their generosity,” board of trustees chairman Matthew Schuyler said. “The board of trustees feels strongly a gift of this magnitude, which will provide such tremendous benefit to our university and our students and faculty, deserves to be recognized.”
In 2015, the Neses created a new advanced-practice nurse scholarship. The next year, the Neses offered an endowment gift to support the Center of Geriatric Nursing Excellence. And in 2017, they established a program for enhancing excellence in care while, in 2018, they endowed another nursing scholarship and a professorship.
And that history led to Thursday, when the $27.125 million gift was first announced.
“The impact of this new funding cannot be overstated,” Badzek added.
