Are you catching heat for turning away a record number of qualified nursing student applications this year?
We need more nurses, they say. We need to strengthen the pipeline, they say. We need to expand nursing programs, they say.
However, nationwide nursing programs turned away 93,176 nursing student applications in 2025—a trend that has been steadily ticking up since 2023.
Unfortunately, this situation is unlikely to improve soon, given that the most recent turnaway data shows 6,496 from master’s programs, 9,859 from Doctor of Nursing Practice (DNP) programs, and 500 from PhD nursing programs.
Faculty recruitment and retention are important parts of addressing those issues. The average faculty vacancy rate of 7.2% makes it difficult to increase student admissions.
This article focuses on the nurse faculty retention side and offers you practical strategies, since recruiting into a role that people keep leaving only moves the problem.
Why faculty turnover matters more than it might seem
You know how it really is. When a nurse educator leaves, the loss isn’t a single line item. The cost of nurse faculty turnover spans recruitment, search committee time, onboarding, and the months a position stays open while remaining faculty absorb the extra load.
Even a conservative estimate runs into the tens of thousands of dollars per departure once lost productivity and search costs are factored in. That number climbs when a role requiring doctoral preparation remains vacant for a full academic year.
The higher cost is often invisible on a budget sheet.
Faculty capacity, not classroom space, is usually the real limit on how many students a program can admit. When a position goes unfilled, course sections get capped, clinical cohorts shrink, and qualified applicants get turned away. That makes nurse educator turnover one of the clearest levers on both enrollment and revenue.
It also feeds on itself because each departure increases the workload on everyone who stays, pushing the next person closer to leaving. Left unaddressed, that loop is how a manageable nursing program faculty shortage becomes a chronic one.
The strategies below are organized around root causes rather than a generic checklist, because a retention plan only works when it targets the reasons people actually walk out the door.
The standard retention fixes, and how to do them well
Some retention moves are standard, but they work when they are done with intent rather than treated as boxes to check. The 3 actions below address the reasons faculty most often cite for leaving, so they belong in any serious approach before the more structural changes that follow.
1. Close the compensation gap where you can
Pay is the first thing faculty name, and the first place programs feel constrained (roughly 34% report noncompetitive salaries as a problem). However, nursing faculty compensation need not be fully competitive to move the needle.
Where budgets allow, these tactics can close some of the gap between academic and clinical earnings:
- Targeted salary adjustments
- Stipends for course coordination
- Loan repayment incentives tied to a service commitment
These adjustments remove the sense of being quietly taken advantage of that, over time, drives resentment.
Where budgets do not allow compensation adjustments, transparency matters more than the number itself. Faculty who understand the program's pay philosophy, including how raises are determined and what non-salary support is available, are far less likely to feel undervalued than those left to guess.
Naming the gap honestly protects nurse faculty job satisfaction even when you cannot fully close it.
2. Build structured mentorship and onboarding
A new hire's first year sets the trajectory for whether they stay.
Structured nursing faculty onboarding provides new educators with a clear map of expectations, resources, and evaluation timelines, rather than leaving them to reverse-engineer the role from scattered emails.
Pairing each new faculty member with an experienced colleague through a formal nurse educator mentorship program does more than support the newcomer.
Mentoring also reinforces the mentor's sense of purpose and identity in the role, making it a good retention tool for both participants.
Note: The pairing works best when the mentor receives recognition or protected time for the work, so that mentoring becomes a valued contribution rather than another uncompensated task layered onto a full schedule.
3. Redesign workload to prevent burnout
Nursing faculty workload is where good intentions quietly unravel, since every unfilled position pushes more onto the people who stay. Reducing nurse educator burnout means treating excessive workload as a design problem rather than a matter of personal resilience.
A few structural changes carry most of the weight:
- Set realistic course loads that account for clinical supervision and advising hours, not just the credit hours taught on paper.
- Protect dedicated time for scholarship and course development so faculty are not doing it on nights and weekends.
- Distribute committee and service responsibilities so that the same few people are not carrying the administrative load year after year.
These changes do more for work-life balance than any standalone wellness offering, because they address the workload issue rather than asking nurse educators to cope with too much.
Build flexibility into the faculty role
The fixes above are necessary but not sufficient because they still assume a traditional format for the job: full-time, classroom-based, and indefinite.
Many capable nurses leave academia not because they dislike teaching, but because that format no longer fits their lives.
Building flexible teaching models for nursing faculty means offering more than 1 way to stay, so a change in circumstances does not have to mean a resignation letter. These 3 structures below do most of that work, and they are the pieces that most retention advice skips.
1. Clinical-only and adjunct tracks
Some would-be educators are experienced bedside nurses who are not ready to leave clinical work. A clinical-only or adjunct track allows them to teach a course or supervise clinicals part-time without committing to a full-time classroom appointment.
Treating adjunct faculty as a real part of the faculty team, rather than as temporary gap-fillers, keeps this pipeline healthy over time. In practice, that means giving adjuncts:
- Genuine orientation
- A named point of contact
- Inclusion in relevant faculty communication
- A path to more responsibility if they want it
Adjuncts who feel like part of the program stay and grow with it; adjuncts who feel disposable leave at the first sign of friction.
2. Job-sharing between part-time educators
Job-sharing splits a full-time course load between 2 part-time faculty members, each teaching a defined portion of the course.
It works as a retention tool for experienced educators who cannot commit to full-time hours, whether because of caregiving, phased retirement, or ongoing clinical practice, but who do not want to leave teaching entirely.
Retaining experienced nurse educators this way keeps institutional knowledge in the building instead of losing it to an all-or-nothing schedule. The main requirement is strong coordination between the partners, including shared grading standards and consistent messaging, so students experience 1 coherent course rather than 2 half-taught ones.
3. Course-load buyouts for research or clinical practice
A course-load buyout lets a faculty member trade 1 course section for protected time to pursue research, scholarship, or continued clinical practice.
For faculty at risk of burning out on a full teaching load, that trade keeps them engaged and present rather than pushing them toward the exit. It also supports faculty who need to keep clinical credentials current, which matters for accreditation and for the credibility they bring back to the classroom.
The 3 options serve different faculty and carry distinct tradeoffs, summarized below.
Note: Each buyout reduces near-term teaching capacity, so programs apply them where the retention or scholarship payoff clearly justifies the cost.
Offer real career advancement tracks
Flexibility keeps faculty from leaving; advancement gives them a reason to stay and grow.
When educators can see a clear route from adjunct to full-time, or from teaching into course leadership and administration, they are more likely to build a long-term future at the institution rather than a temporary stop.
A defined nurse educator career ladder makes that route visible, rather than leaving it to chance or favoritism. It does not require new money so much as clarity on:
- Named roles
- Stated criteria for moving between them
- Honest conversations about where each person wants to go
That structure turns a job into a career, which is one of the most durable solutions to the nursing faculty shortage that a single program can implement on its own.
Measure whether your retention strategy is working
Retention efforts are easy to launch and easy to let drift, so the follow-through is the hard part.
Set target vacancy and turnover rates, then track your program against them each term or year. Watching your faculty vacancy rate, exit-interview themes, and time-to-fill tells you whether these nurse faculty retention strategies are actually changing behavior or just adding activity.
If the numbers hold steady while you keep investing, that is a signal to revisit root causes rather than repeat the same fixes at a higher volume. Knowing how to retain nursing faculty is less about a single initiative than about measuring, adjusting, and staying honest about what the data shows over time.
Strengthen your nursing program's foundation
Faculty retention is 1 piece of building a strong nursing program. Nursa for Schools helps simplify clinical placements and student tracking so your team can spend more time on what matters most. Learn more about Nursa for Schools.
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