The United States Cadet Nurse Corps was a wartime program that paid for nursing education outright. Created by the Bolton Act in June 1943 and run by the Public Health Service, it remains the largest federal investment in nursing education the country has ever made.
Roughly 124,000 nurses graduated through it before it closed to new entrants in 1945 and wound up in 1948, from something over a thousand participating schools. At its height it was funding the overwhelming majority of American nursing students.
Why it existed
By 1943 the military was taking nurses out of civilian hospitals faster than schools could replace them, and civilian hospitals were running out. Congresswoman Frances Payne Bolton of Ohio put forward a bill that attacked the supply side rather than rationing what existed.
The terms were generous and simple. The government paid tuition and fees, provided a monthly stipend, and issued a uniform with its own insignia. In exchange the student agreed to remain in essential nursing, military or civilian, for the duration of the war. Programs were compressed so students reached useful work faster, with the final period spent as a senior cadet doing supervised practice in a hospital, which is how the corps solved the staffing problem while it was still training people.
The non-discrimination clause
The Bolton Act barred participating schools from discriminating on the basis of race, creed or color. That made it the first federally funded program in American history to carry such a condition, twenty years before the Civil Rights Act.
It worked unevenly. Some nursing schools that had never admitted Black students did so in order to take the money. Others took the money and complied in name only, and hospital training in much of the country stayed segregated. Around 3,000 Black women entered nursing through the corps, a substantial number against the exclusion that preceded it, and small against the total. The provision belongs in the history of American nursing regardless, both for what it achieved and for how much of the discrimination it was meant to end simply continued. See history of nursing.
The corps was also open to married women and to women who married during training, at a time when many nursing schools expelled students who married.
What became of it
The program ended with the war, and the federal government did not replace it. Nursing education went back to being paid for by students, and the shortage the corps had been created to solve returned within a few years.
Its graduates spent the next four decades in American hospitals. Many of the nurses who built postwar hospital nursing, and who taught the generation after them, had been cadets, and the compressed clinical model the corps used influenced how diploma schools ran into the 1960s.
One thing they never received was veteran status. Cadets wore a federal uniform, were bound by a federal service obligation, and staffed military and veterans' hospitals, but the corps was administered by the Public Health Service rather than the armed forces, and bills to grant its members veteran recognition have been introduced repeatedly since the 1990s without passing. Most of the women concerned have since died.
Nellie Wade, who trained in a Cadet Nurse Corps unit at Wheeling Hospital in West Virginia and was still practicing in Florida past the age of 90, was one of them.
Related
Sources
- The U.S. Cadet Nurse Corps, 1943 to 1948. U.S. National Library of Medicine. Accessed September 8, 2026.
- Bolton Act, Public Law 78-74. United States Congress, June 15, 1943. Accessed September 8, 2026.
- The U.S. Cadet Nurse Corps in World War II. American Journal of Public Health. Accessed September 8, 2026.