The growing demand for cultural competence that addresses healthcare disparities led to the need for academic nurse administrators and faculty to investigate teaching and learning processes that would enable students to forge relationships across the diverse American population. Additionally, regulatory bodies and nursing leadership have called for reform in academic nursing that includes diversity education. The purpose of this exploratory, comparative, study was to investigate the effect of a Multicultural Education Program (MEP) on senior baccalaureate-nursing students' motivation to learn, faculty-student relationship, classroom climate, and student self-efficacy in clinical performance. Banks' Five Dimensions of Multicultural Education: content, integration, knowledge construction, equity pedagogy, prejudice reduction and an empowering school culture and social structure, along with Campinha-Bacote's Process of Cultural Competence in the Delivery of Health Care Services provided the theoretical frameworks for this study. The 46-item Multicultural Nursing Education Program Inventory (MNEPI) was developed for data-collection. Factor Analysis resulted in the elimination of the variable "classroom climate" and a new variable "feeling accepted" emerged. Survey responses were collected from 160 students in two types of nursing colleges, those with a Multicultural Education Program (MEP) and those with a traditional curriculum (No-MEP). Two-way ANOVAs were run to analyze the survey responses and explore the interaction and main effects of linguistic diversity and school type on each of the dependent variables. Additionally, there was one open-ended question that was analyzed using a thematic approach. The analysis revealed significant main effects such that students in No-MEP programs reported stronger faculty student relationships and higher self-efficacy regarding clinical practice than MEP students. Additionally, linguistically diverse students reported feeling more accepted at school than non-linguistically diverse students. Finally, the participants perceived that the multicultural education they received and exposure to diverse peers had a substantial impact on their self-efficacy. Keywords: Diversity, Multicultural Education, Nursing Education, Self-Efficacy in clinical practice. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://bibliotheek.ehb.be:2222/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]