The St. Petersburg Skills Lab was established ten years ago in Florida and was one of the first sites to launch in response to the shortage of qualified nurses and fully accredited nursing programs in the state. After all currently enrolled students complete the program, on-site instruction will be discontinued due to a decline in enrollment numbers as a result of changes in market conditions. 

According to Utica University President Todd Pfannestiel, the St. Petersburg site has produced more than 700 successful graduates since the program’s commencement and has one of Florida’s top NCLEX exam passing rates. 

Pfannestiel said with Florida being a hotspot for medical attention and care due to the large aging population, many other institutions have “flooded the market” in the past 10 years. 

“Students can now pick any one of dozens of programs and while we aren’t the most expensive one, again, it’s a quality education and it costs a lot to deliver it,” Pfannestiel said. “As a result, we were not able to deliver it at a price that would compete with some of these other schools that came in.” 

He said numbers started to slowly decline in terms of student interest and enrollment and they finally reached the point where we asked ourselves, “have we achieved everything we could achieve in Florida?”

“We started to see the declining numbers around the start of the pandemic but then you have to be really careful to be sure it was not just the pandemic. Otherwise we would have made this decision in 2021,” Pfannestiel said. “We decided to wait it out a bit. It went back up a little bit but then you could tell it was starting to wind down. So here we are three years removed from the pandemic and we watched the market real carefully. I never want to sound like I am throwing the towel and saying let’s give up on it. It was just an educated decision.”

Pfannestiel explained that the program enrolled students in three cohorts over the 10 years and the program aimed to bring in 24 students each cohort, expecting to have 72 new students coming in through the year. He said the university started to see the cohort numbers go from around 24 – 20 to 15 students.

After the decision to discontinue, Utica University will redirect its attention and resources to its New York State nursing programs located in Syracuse and Latham, and its reputable online learning nursing programs, he said. 

“The Syracuse site has always been strong, and it remains strong but Latham is just skyrocketing now,” Pfannestiel said.”There’s a great need out of New York City and there are students coming up from there so it is really starting to spike.”

He said over the course of the next year and a half, the university will “teach out” and assist all of the students at the St. Petersburg location in graduating. Any funds and resources spent there will then be sent back up to the New York sites and the Utica campus, giving us the opportunity to “reallocate pieces of the pie.”

“So you close one door, it always opens another,” Pfannestiel said. “It’s been worthwhile and it certainly benefited the university in terms of our reputation and generation of money. The revenue that we are able to invest right back here on this campus. So everybody won.”

According to Pfannestiel, the last cohort of students was this fall of 2024.  

“We communicated with all the students currently on site individually and said no worries, think of it as you are the final chapter. We are going to do right by you, the labs, experiences will be just as robust as if you were the first class 10 years ago,” Pfannestiel said.

He said the success of faculty and students is demonstrated by the work done in St. Petersburg and his discussion would have taken place five or six years ago if it weren’t for the outstanding faculty and students. We celebrate the success and don’t limit the closing because they made this work for ten years, he said. 

“It’s not that we are closing out of failure. We’re closing it because we achieved exactly what we wanted to achieve,” Pfannestiel said. “We’ve helped educate hundreds of licensed nurses out of this program that I know are leaving their mark, not just in Florida, but many other states as well.”