Charles R. Drew University of Medicine and Science

Charles R. Drew University of Medicine and Science sits on a one-square-mile campus in Watts-Willowbrook in South Los Angeles, on the same medical campus as Martin Luther King Jr. Community Hospital and King/Drew Medical Magnet High School. It is a private, nonprofit health sciences university, and it is one of only four historically Black medical colleges in the United States. The federal designation that fits CDU most precisely is Historically Black Graduate Institution, recognizing that CDU was founded primarily to train Black and Latino health professionals at the graduate and professional level. For the purposes of this guide, we group HBGIs alongside traditional 4-year HBCUs, because for a Black student considering a nursing or health sciences pathway, CDU offers the same lineage of Black-led education in medicine.

CDU was founded in 1966, one year after the Watts Rebellion of 1965. The Rebellion exposed how few hospitals and physicians served South Los Angeles, and a coalition of local activists, community leaders, and physicians pushed for a teaching hospital and medical school inside the neighborhood. King-Drew Medical Center opened in 1972, and CDU has been training physicians and nurses on that same campus ever since. The university is named for Dr. Charles Richard Drew, the Black physician and surgeon who pioneered blood plasma banking and ran the Blood for Britain program during World War II. The founding story is part of why CDU recruits the way it does. According to CDU's own 2025-2026 enrollment numbers, the student body is 34.8% Black or African American and 31% Hispanic or Latino, and 58% of students come from Los Angeles County itself. More than 80% of graduates intern or practice in underserved communities.

The Mervyn M. Dymally College of Nursing is the largest college at CDU, with 41.2% of the university's total enrollment of 1,226 students. The BSN program received full 10-year accreditation from the Commission on Collegiate Nursing Education (CCNE) effective September 25, 2025, valid through June 30, 2035. The MSN and APRN certificate programs are also CCNE-accredited and approved by the California Board of Registered Nursing. The BSN program offers two pathways, Pre-Nursing to BSN for first-time and transfer students, and RN-to-BSN for licensed nurses advancing their education. CDU also runs an LVN-to-BSN bridge. The Entry-Level Master of Science in Nursing, commonly called the MEPN, is built for students who already hold a non-nursing bachelor's degree and want to enter nursing at the master's level. The MEPN runs two years full time, 81 credit hours, and prepares graduates to sit for the NCLEX-RN.

NCLEX-RN first-time pass rates for the most recent reporting year published by the California Board of Registered Nursing show CDU's BSN program at 65.71% on 35 candidates and the Entry-Level MSN program at 86.67% on 45 candidates. The MSN figure is in line with the California state average of approximately 89% for BSN programs. The BSN figure is below the state average, and prospective students should weigh that openly. CDU's BSN program graduated its first cohort recently, and pass rates often shift as a program matures. CDU has separately published a five-year aggregate first-time NCLEX-RN pass rate of 86% across the College of Nursing.

Clinical training is one of CDU's strongest selling points. Students rotate through Martin Luther King Jr. Community Hospital, the safety-net hospital directly on the CDU campus, alongside Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, Children's Hospital Los Angeles, Harbor-UCLA Medical Center, and CommonSpirit Health facilities. The Entry-Level MSN also places students at community sites such as the Girls Club of Los Angeles. Few nursing programs in California give students this kind of mix of academic medical center, community hospital, and underserved-population fieldwork.

CDU is private, so there is no in-state or out-of-state tuition distinction. BSN tuition for the 2025-2026 academic year is a flat $31,800 per year. The full cost of attendance, which includes living expenses, transportation, books, personal expenses, medical insurance, and federal loan fees, is $76,108 if living with a parent or relative and $96,108 if living off campus. CDU states that more than 80% of students receive some form of financial aid, and the Financial Aid Office at (323) 563-4824 or finaid@cdrewu.edu publishes a net price calculator for personalized estimates.

BSN applications are due July 1 for fall start, October 1 for spring start, and March 1 for summer start. Entry-Level MSN applications are due July 1 for fall and November 1 for spring. The general admissions office is at (323) 563-4800, 1731 E. 120th St., Los Angeles, CA 90059, and the admissions portal lives at cdrewu.edu/admissions/. The nursing program's enrollment specialist, Jasmine S. Verges, can be reached at jasmineverges@cdrewu.edu for BSN-specific questions.

Beyond nursing, CDU offers the standalone MD program (provisional LCME accreditation granted in July 2025), the long-running CDU/UCLA Medical Education Program, a Master of Health Science in Physician Assistant studies (ARC-PA accredited), an MPH in Urban Health Disparities, a Master of Science in Genetic Counseling, a PhD in Translational Biomedical Sciences, the Postbaccalaureate Leadership Program in Pre-Medicine, and bachelor's degrees in Biomedical Sciences, Public Health, Radiologic Sciences, and Psychology with a Community Counseling emphasis. Institutional accreditation is held by WSCUC, granted in 1995. Student support includes the Office of Student Accessibility Services, on-campus counseling and wellness care, tutoring and supplemental instruction, the Support Our Students program, dedicated resources for undocumented students, and career services that continue to serve alumni.

If you are a Black student weighing CDU for nursing or a health sciences pathway, the case is direct. You will train on a Black-founded campus where the patient population and the faculty look like the communities you came up in. You will be expected to work in underserved communities after graduation, and the curriculum, the clinical sites, and the institutional mission are all built around that. Cost is real, the BSN NCLEX pass rate has room to climb, and CDU is honest about both. But the lineage, from Watts in 1965 to a working MD program with provisional LCME accreditation in 2025, is one of the clearest examples of a Black institution building exactly what it set out to build.