Nursing programs turned away 80,162 qualified applications in 2024.
Yes, you read that correctly.
This happened not because the applicants weren’t good enough, and not because interest is falling. It happened because there is nobody to teach these candidates.
The nursing faculty shortage is creating a massive pain point for all educational systems and the medical landscape as a whole.
This shortage is normally discussed as a retention problem. However, this framing is sending programs after the wrong fix. Losing faculty you already have is serious, and it deserves its own attention.
The more fundamental issue, however, is that the pool of qualified, willing educators is too small to begin with. So, even if you solve every workload issue, you would still be competing over a limited number of people.
So, where does this information leave you and your budget?
This article will cover why the educator pipeline is constricted, and three things a program can do about it without waiting for a systemic report.
Why is there a nursing faculty shortage?
Understanding why there is a nursing faculty shortage starts with three forces that compound each other. None is new. Together, they explain how bad the nursing faculty shortage is for programs trying to staff their classrooms today.
The nursing faculty shortage causes below are structural, which is exactly why they persist year after year.
Do you really need a doctorate to teach nursing?
For core academic appointments, it is often necessary. However, the short answer is that you don’t necessarily need a doctorate to teach nursing. However, most full-time, tenure-track faculty positions require or prefer a terminal degree, either a research doctorate (PhD) or a Doctor of Nursing Practice (DNP). The number of doctorally prepared nurses entering academia has not kept pace with demand, and the trend is worsening.
The doctoral pool is narrowing at the source. The American Association of Colleges of Nursing (AACN) reports that PhD nursing programs declined for the eleventh straight year in 2024, down 17.9% since 2013. Fewer doctoral graduates means fewer future faculty. AACN's fact sheet points to this limited pool of doctorally prepared educators as a central driver of the shortage.
The on-ramp to academia is congested, and it stays that way. Worse, the bottleneck feeds itself. It takes doctorally prepared faculty to teach doctoral students, so a thin faculty layer today limits how many new researchers and educators a program can graduate tomorrow. That is the loop that the programs are trying to break.
The pay gap steers nurses away from academia
Even when nurses qualify to teach, the money often doesn't add up. The nursing faculty salary gap is well-documented and quietly shapes career decisions across the field.
A 2025 University at Albany analysis found that nurses in education earned less than other full-time nurses.
The effect is predictable. Nurses who might otherwise teach choose instead advanced practice, management, or specialty clinical roles because those paths pay more and often offer clearer opportunities for advancement. Every time that happens, the educator pipeline loses another candidate.
Consider the individual math. A nurse weighing a faculty role has usually invested years and considerable expense in graduate education. Asking that person to then earn less than they would at the bedside is a hard sell, no matter how much they love teaching. Until the numbers move closer together, passion alone will not close the gap.
Aging faculty retire faster than replacements
The educator workforce is also getting older. A significant share of current nurse faculty are 55 and older, and programs face a wave of retirements over the coming decade.
This is why the shortage is chronic rather than episodic. Retirements guarantee that vacancies keep reopening. And each departure takes something a job posting can't replace: years of clinical judgment, institutional knowledge, and mentoring relationships that took a career to build. When these forces combine, the cost falls on students.
How to widen your hiring pool right now
Here's the encouraging part. Programs can act today, before any systemic reform arrives. The best nurse educator shortage solutions start by rethinking who counts as eligible to teach and where your next educators might come from.
Can a BSN be a clinical instructor?
Not every teaching role looks like a traditional professor appointment. Clinical instructors, skills lab faculty, and simulation educators often operate under different requirements, which opens the door to candidates you may be overlooking.
In many cases, a BSN can be a clinical instructor. The National League for Nursing (NLN) Certified Academic Clinical Nurse Educator credential recognizes clinical teaching through a Certified Academic Clinical Nurse Educator (CNEcl) clinical instructor pathway that includes routes built on a bachelor's degree plus significant clinical and teaching experience. That framework shows that BSN-prepared nurses can meet national standards for clinical teaching through experience and certification, not solely through a doctorate.
You can put this to work quickly:
- Design dedicated clinical instructor and adjunct roles focused on bedside teaching, labs, or simulation.
- Recruit against BSN-plus experience criteria aligned with CNEcl standards to broaden your pool.
- Support interested clinicians in earning Certified Nurse Educator (CNE) or CNEcl certification, giving them a clear path into education.
These roles don't replace graduate-prepared faculty. They complement them by covering the parts of the curriculum that rely most heavily on current clinical expertise.
A working ICU nurse teaching a critical care clinical brings a currency that's hard to replicate from behind a lectern.
Build dual clinician-educator partnerships
Another lever sits outside your own payroll. Local health systems employ experienced nurses who would teach well but don't see a route into academia.
Practice-academic partnerships bridge that gap. In these arrangements, practicing clinicians teach part-time, precept, or guest-lecture while maintaining their clinical positions. The result is a wider set of instructors and teaching that stays grounded in real-world practice.
Picture how it works in practice. A program and a nearby hospital agree that two experienced medical-surgical nurses will each lead one clinical group per semester, with the hospital adjusting their schedules and the school covering an adjunct stipend. The nurses keep their benefits and seniority.
The program gains two instructors it could not have hired full-time. Students learn in the same unit where those nurses practice, so the teaching reflects current protocols rather than a textbook from five years ago.
For administrators, the payoff is concrete. You gain access to specialized instructors without new full-time hires, you strengthen the relevance of clinical teaching, and you build a smoother clinical-to-academic nursing pipeline for nurses who may transition more fully into education later.
Start small. Pilot one joint role. Then expand as trust and logistics allow.
Grow your own faculty from your graduates
Your strongest future educators may already be sitting in your classrooms. Some of the most effective nursing faculty recruitment strategies focus on spotting them early.
Grow-your-own models identify potential educators before graduation and nurture them through teaching assistantships, leadership experience, and mentorship. You can build your own version of this without a large budget.
Try a few of these:
- Flag high-performing BSN and MSN students with strong communication and leadership skills.
- Offer teaching assistant roles in labs, simulation, or introductory courses.
- Integrate exposure to educator roles into capstone or practicum experiences.
- Connect interested students with faculty mentors who can talk through academic careers.
What does that look like week to week? A senior BSN student might spend a few hours helping run a skills lab, coaching first-years through a sterile dressing change under a faculty member's eye.
They see the craft of teaching up close, discover whether they enjoy it, and start picturing it as a career. That early, low-stakes exposure does more than any recruiting brochure ever could.
This is really about visibility. Many students never picture teaching as a viable career, especially given the pay gap. Early exposure makes the role tangible and reachable.
Longer-term fixes worth tracking
Some levers sit above any single program. You can't solve them alone, but you can track and advocate for them.
The Nurse Faculty Loan Program is a strong example. The Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) program lends to graduate nursing students who commit to full-time faculty service, with substantial loan cancellation for those who meet the requirements.
It directly lowers the financial barrier to the advanced degrees faculty roles demand, which speaks to the pay gap from a different angle.
Other systemic efforts include expanding doctoral program capacity, funding faculty development, and pushing for more competitive educator compensation at the state and institutional levels.
These won't fill your next vacancy. But they shape the candidate pool over the next five to ten years, and they help address nurse educator burnout on the retention side once your new hires are in place.
Advocacy also compounds. When programs across a state speak with one voice to legislators and hospital partners, funding and policy tend to follow.
Once you've filled the role, keep it filled
Sure, you need to keep your nurse educators with less workload, course release, mentorship, etc. But, widening the pipeline gets people in the door.
However, a program that builds real adjunct and clinical instructor roles isn’t only recruiting. It’s also relieving the course load on the full-time faculty it already has, which is one of the more reliable ways to keep them.
Start today with one change. Design a single clinical instructor role against CNEcl criteria, or pilot one joint appointment with a hospital partner. The programs that close their gaps rarely do it with a strategy document. They do it by proving one arrangement works and then repeating it.
Hiring your nurse faculty is only half the problem. Learn more about keeping your nurse educators happy and increasing retention.
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