The U.S. needs more nurses, but nursing schools don't have enough slots
Struggle is nothing new to Foxx Whitford.
He grew up desperately poor in Fairfield, Calif., losing a beloved brother to epilepsy and getting evicted from his home as a child. As a teenager, he joined the Marines to help put himself through college and completed a harrowing tour in Afghanistan. All of that hardship, he says, prepared him for one of his biggest life challenges: Getting into and through nursing school during a pandemic.
"Every time things get hard, I always think about all those losses and hard times," says Whitford, a nursing student at California State University, East Bay.
And everything about his nurse training has been hard. Whitford, a C-average student in high school, says he spent sleepless nights in community college, studying and teaching himself to
