The president of a for-profit Central Florida nursing school pleaded last month with members of a state board for leniency after graduates of his program performed poorly on the national nurse licensing exam — for the third consecutive year.
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Oladimeji Adekunle was in luck. Again.
Though banned from offering educational services in Pennsylvania after that state found he’d taken students’ money but never offered the promised nursing classes, he had won permission to open a nursing school in Florida in 2020.
Ever since, students at his Riggs College of Allied Health have struggled to pass the national nursing exam, quickly landing the Longwood school on probation.
And in late May, Riggs faced questions from state officials after just one graduate passed the test during the first three months of 2026. But in the end, Adekunle was told he could continue enrolling students at Riggs, which advertises tuition of $30,000 for its associate degree program.
The experiences of Riggs College constitute a case study in how poorly some of Florida’s nursing schools are preparing their students to care for some of the state’s most vulnerable residents — and how leniently regulators are policing those institutions.
The state has roughly 300 private nursing programs, some of which perform similarly to Riggs, but closing them can take years thanks to a 2009 law that loosened nursing school regulations.
At their May 28 meeting, members of the Commission for Independent Education, a division of the Florida Department of Education that oversees private, unaccredited colleges like Riggs, asked pointed questions and sounded dismayed by the school’s performance. Then they chose only to limit the number of new students who could enroll, setting a cap of no more than 40 new ones a year in its registered nurse programs.
“The pass rate is supposed to be getting better,” commission member John Euliano said during the meeting when Riggs leaders spoke to the group. “It looks like it’s getting worse,” he said, adding that Riggs situation made him “uneasy.”
Still he voted with others to do no more than limit new enrollment at the school that now has about 120 students, most of them in the school’s two programs for prospective registered nurses. Adekunle said the school would struggle to pay its faculty members’ salaries and the campus rent, if it could only add 40 new students, but commissioners said they felt like they were being generous, given the school’s performance.
The 2009 Florida law intended to address the state’s nursing shortage and opened the door for more private, for-profit schools to set up shop in Florida, resulting in hundreds of new schools enrolling students over the past 15 years. Riggs College, located in a professional complex off State Road 434, was among the newcomers.
It is also an example of the law’s shortcomings.
The law loosened regulations on nursing education, making it easier to launch shoddy schools and harder to shut them down. Many of the new schools churned out students whose pricey degrees left them ill-prepared to enter the field because they could not pass the needed national licensing exam.
And under that 2009 law, Florida often allows schools to stay open for years even as their students struggle to master the National Council Licensing Examination, or NCLEX, a requirement to work as a nurse in Florida and elsewhere in the United States. A few public programs also routinely perform below the national average on NCLEX.
For the past three years, state lawmakers have tried but failed to pass reforms that would tighten oversight of these nursing programs, including allowing the Florida Board of Nursing to more quickly weed out underachieving programs and requiring them to close those that fail to gain accreditation quickly. Part of the impetus was the FBI’s “Operation Nightingale,” an investigation announced in 2023 that found more than two dozen Florida nursing school officials had sold more than 7,000 fake nursing degrees. Most of the schools, now shuttered, opened shortly after the 2009 law passed.
The latest legislative effort died during the 2026 session when the Florida House passed a bill to address the problem but the Senate declined to consider it.
Florida’s nursing board approved Adekunle’s bid to open a nursing program here in 2020.
It’s not clear if Florida knew that in 2011, he and his former school, America Health Care Inc., were sued by Pennsylvania after he tried to open a nursing program without obtaining that state’s approval. He collected application and registration fees from 25 prospective students, as well as tuition deposits, and shuttered the operation without starting classes, the state said. A judge ultimately sided with Pennsylvania and determined the school had violated the law. Adekunle and the school were ordered to pay $100,000 in civil penalties and were banned from offering educational services in that state.
The school’s 2019 application to the Florida’s nursing board also appeared to contain inaccurate information about where Riggs students would do required clinical training as it listed a dozen public schools in Orange County. But Orange County Public Schools does not provide clinical training for future nurses, a spokesperson said in an email this month, and while Riggs contacted the district and said it wanted to send its students to OCPS campuses, it never reached an agreement with the district for such activities.
The Department of Education and the Department of Health, which includes the Board of Nursing, didn’t respond to emailed questions about the school from the Orlando Sentinel.
Once open, Riggs faced rough going.
A Deltona woman sued the school in 2023, saying she paid $8,000 in advance to enroll in the school’s practical nursing program and then was told her classes were canceled because of low enrollment, according to a lawsuit filed in Seminole County circuit court. Months later, the school still had not refunded her tuition, according to the complaint. The woman settled with the school in April 2024, though details of the agreement weren’t made public.
For the past three years, Riggs students have posed passage rates at least 10 percentage points below the national average on the NCLEX. Last year, 69% of Riggs graduates passed on the first try, compared with 87% of their peers nationwide and 82% of Florida test-takers. The previous year, 80% of Riggs students cleared that hurdle. Riggs has had relatively few graduates taking the test, with no more than 22 prospective nurses sitting for the exam for the first time each year.
The school’s low passage rates prompted the state’s board of nursing, which holds the power to approve and close nursing programs, to put Riggs’ associate degree program on probation in February for the second year in a row.
And that prompted the Commission for Independent Education, which licenses schools like Riggs, to require college officials to appear at its May 28 meeting.
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Adekunle told commissioners that Riggs is “facing multiple fires from everywhere.”
He blamed the school’s most recent NCLEX failures on an issue with a “proxy” in India who was taking an end-of-program test on his students’ behalf, making it appear they would likely score well on the licensure exam. He didn’t explain further.
Of the six Riggs graduates who took the NCLEX during the first quarter of 2026, only one passed.
Commissioners said the proxy issue didn’t explain why students were so poorly prepared for the high-stakes licensure exam.
“It seems that the deficiency in the actual scores is a reflection of the educational training that the students received in the course of the program and that’s kind of a broader concern,” said Troy Stefano, the group’s vice chair. The school needs “critical reflection on the program itself and a deeper kind of accountability for these outcomes,” he added.
Adekunle continued to deflect criticism from the commissioners, telling them it was difficult to get his students to come to school, and that students were quick to complain about Riggs’ strict adherence to the rules set for nursing programs in Florida.
“But we are not giving up,” he said. “We stand tall.”
Reached by phone this week, Riggs’ chief operating officer declined to comment further about the discussion during the commission meeting, the Pennsylvania lawsuit or the school’s clinical training.
Clinical training is considered a critical piece of nursing education, helping develop skills like placing IVs and catheters. Riggs’ website says 720 hours of clinical training is required, though it is not clear where its students do that work.
Adekunle told commissioners that his school provides clinical training but didn’t specify where.
“We are very serious with students completing their clinicals for the safety of the citizens,” he said.
Riggs is more expensive than local public universities and colleges. The for-profit school charges tuition of $439 per credit hour, according to its website, which also notes it does not offer financial aid. And because Riggs is not accredited, students can’t use federal grants or subsidized loans to help pay for classes.
Valencia College, by comparison, charges $103 per credit hour for in-state students, who are also eligible for state and federal financial aid. And Valencia graduates who took the NCLEX exam during the first quarter of this year were much more likely to pass it the first time, with a 87% passage rate compared to Riggs’ 16%. But Valencia receives many more applicants for its programs than it has room to take.
New Florida nursing programs are required to obtain accreditation within five years, though nursing board members sometimes grant extensions to schools that fail to meet that deadline. Riggs has been working for four-and-a-half years to become accredited, Adekunle said.
The Accreditation Commission for Education in Nursing, a national group that reviews public and private programs across the country, is expected to visit Riggs in October, he said. He implored education commissioners not to take action against his school, saying that any negative ruling could hurt his school’s ability to gain the group’s approval.
Not having accreditation hurts Riggs graduates, he said, naming one woman who was unable to obtain a nursing license in Maryland because she attended an unaccredited program. Florida routinely licenses nurses who attended unaccredited schools, however.
Commissioners told Adekunle that Riggs’ ongoing effort to gain accreditation wasn’t their concern.
“I need you to understand that our primary commitment is to the welfare and protection of students, not to securing your accreditation,” Stefano said.
Euliano said he was bothered that Riggs’ leaders failed to detail a clear plan for improving their test scores and argued with commissioners about limiting enrollment to 40 new students per year in programs for prospective registered nurses.
Capping the number of students at the school, Euliano said, should ensure they get more individual attention.
“The school is acting like we’re doing something to them, but what we’re reacting to is what they are doing to students,” Euliano said. “And so this is a student protection issue. They should feel fortunate they’re getting what they’re getting.”
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