Arkansas Northeastern College

Arkansas Northeastern College (ANC) in Blytheville is a small, public community college setup, so the vibe is more “local program with practical expectations” than big-university nursing. They’ve got three nursing paths people usually ask about: LPN, ADN (RN), and an LPN-to-ADN bridge. Since it’s a community college, tuition is generally on the affordable side compared to private schools, but nursing-specific costs (uniforms, background checks, drug screens, books, testing fees) still add up like they do anywhere.

Blytheville is in the Mississippi County corner of northeast Arkansas, close to the Missouri/Tennessee lines. The campus is in town, and most students are commuting; so it’s the kind of place where having reliable transportation matters. For clinicals, ANC nursing students rotate through Great River Medical Center in Blytheville and also use other nearby northeast Arkansas sites depending on the semester and program track (so schedules can be a little drive-heavy if someone’s coming in from farther out). Like most nursing programs, they also use on-campus skills/simulation to practice before being cut loose in clinical.

Teaching-wise, community college programs like this usually run pretty structured: lecture + skills checkoffs + clinical days, with a lot of focus on test-style questions and staying on top of weekly deadlines. The numbers back up that the RN side is doing something right... ANC’s average RN NCLEX pass rate is about 96.2%, which is above Arkansas’s 91.1% average. The PN pass rate averages 83.8%, which is below the state PN average (92.4%), so anyone looking at the LPN track might want to ask what support is in place (tutoring, remediation, repeat policies) and how recent cohorts have done.