Nursing Academia: We Need New Blood!

[VickyRN]

The average age of academic nurse educators in the U.S. is 55.5 years. Meanwhile, the average age at which nurse faculty members retire is 62.5 years. It is not surprising, therefore, that at least 40% of currently-practicing nursing instructors are projected to retire within the next 10 years. When these aging faculty soon retire en masse, who will be there to replace them to teach the next generation of nurses? Where are the younger educators who should be waiting in the wings and coming up through the ranks of academia?

It certainly doesn't help matters that the average annual salary of nurse educators is $65,000, while the academic preparation necessary for this teaching specialty is rigorous, time-consuming, and expensive to obtain. The typical pay of nurse faculty lags significantly behind the pay of clinical, administrative, and advance practice nurses. For example, staff registered nurses within hospital settings average $40,000 to $79,000, clinical nurse educators average $76,000, nurse practitioners average $89,000, certified nurse midwives average $91,000, certified registered nurse anesthetists average $156,000, and nurse executives average $161,000 yearly. It is therefore understandably difficult to recruit promising young nurses into the nursing education field.

What are some strategies that nurse faculty can use to attract younger nurses into nursing education?

• Nurse educators should model enthusiasm and excellence in teaching, as well as caring professional involvement with students. In doing so, they present nursing education as an attractive career option to nursing students.
• Nurse faculty should seek out nursing students who show a propensity for teaching and encourage them to pursue a career in nursing education. They should offer to mentor aspiring young nurse educators as they choose to pursue this career goal.
• Nursing instructors should ask staff nurses who like to teach students on the clinical unit if they would like to lead a clinical group as an adjunct clinical nursing instructor. Many hospitals have clinical education partnerships with affiliated nursing schools.

We are witnessing a perfect storm brewing in nursing academia with impending mass faculty vacancies. This is due to a combination of elements: a rapidly aging nurse educator workforce who will soon be retiring, relatively poor pay, and a dearth of young nursing instructors in the "pipes" to replace them. What ideas do you have to avert a disastrous nurse faculty shortage and to attract younger nurses into the wonderful career of nursing education?

References

• Certified midwife salary
• Nursing faculty shortage
• Salary for a certified registered nurse anesthetist (crna)
• Salary for registered nurse (rn) jobs

[llg, PhD, RN]

A couple of things that aren't necessarily related to each other:

1. Putting things online doesn't always make things cheaper. In fact, it can be more expensive. I teach online and it is very time consuming for the instructor and can be quite expensive for the school if it is done well. Experts in the field are very quick to point out that there is not always a cost savings when moving things online.

2. I agree that there are too many nursing schools. But before someone responds about the number of students being turned away, consider these aspects of the situation:

a. Many of these schools are small, and therefore, very inefficient. They each need a library, a learning lab, administrators, faculty, buildings, etc. If these small schools were closed -- or consolidated into one big one -- the resources could be shared, resulting in a major cost savings. Instead of them each looking for a part time, adjunct peds instructor ... they could pool the money and hire a full time pediatric instructor and pay him/her a decent salary with full benefits. It would be a win-win-win situation for the school, the instructor, and for the students.

b. While some very qualified students have trouble getting into nursing school because the schools can't find enough clinical slots ... a lot of those slots are taken by schools who have very low admission standards. I talk to some students who are barely articulate and go to schools with bad reputations ... but there they are, occupying slots that could be used for more qualified students. The "industry" needs a good "shake out." We should all support our Boards of Nursing when they try to sanction and/or close down poorly performing schools -- of which there are many. That would make room for the good students.

c. Schools are often UNREASONABLY slow to change their ways. There are ways to address the limited availability of clinical slots and faculty -- and they all just shake there heads and say something like, "Oh, but that would require we change the way we do things. We can't do that. Making changes in just too hard and there are too many committees that would have to approve." If schools really want to solve the problems, they can do it ... but they will have to learn to be responsive to a changing environment and stop being entrenched in their old-fashioned ideas about nursing education. For example, not every student NEEDS the exact same clinical experiences in all the specialty areas. Reserve the most difficult experiences to get for those students really interested in those specialties, etc.

As I have said many times before ... schools can fix this problem if they really want to. Schools find the money for sports stadiums, for law professors, for computer science professors, business and economics professors, etc. -- and pay faculty in other disciplines more money than nursing instructors all the time. But most pay nursing faculty on the same payscale as the humanities and social sciences faculties -- where people who only have Master's Degrees are grad students working on the PhD's who are getting tuition reimbursement as well as their salary and who are happy to have a job in their field that gives them valuable experience while they are in school. Nursing is not in the same situation. It's compensation needs to be looked at through a different paradigm.

When nursing schools start considering their issues with new paradigms, they'll find plenty of possible routes to take to solve their problems. But as long as they are using the paradigms of the 1950's and 1960's, they will be out-of-sync with reality and unlikely to make much progress.

[Rose_Queen, BSN, MSN, RN]

I'm someone who's young and interested in eventually teaching. If accepted, I'll start my MSN in education next summer. However, because I'm expecting tuition reimbursement from my employer, I'll be expected to remain there for several years. Teaching may have to be done as a part time position, and to be honest, I'm not sure I'd be fully qualified since my experience is solely OR. I've never worked anywhere else, and there aren't many schools out there that offer OR as a class/clinical. (Wish there were, but that's another post)

[nursel56]

I don't have any hard data to prove the point, but it seems to me that nursing, more than any other profession I'm familiar with, has a chasm-like disconnect between the academic world and the "real working nurse" world. It isn't a matter of age. It's a matter of perceived connections between what is taught in school and the reality of work, considerably dampening the enthusiasm people might feel for teaching otherwise. It's really striking to read the amount of animosity many working nurses feel toward "the ivory tower". They seem to feel academia is insular, intransigent and dogmatic to the point of exasperation (not my opinion!)I think more people are attracted to a job by the thought "I want to be one of them than they are "I want to shake things up".

Those brave few educators/faculty members who post here really need to don the triple-thickness fireproof suit to venture their thoughts. To be honest, it really upsets me to see - because I've gotten to know them as people and they are trying to do their best to explain the relevance of their education in the middle of a noisy room full of dissenters. I don't have a study, citations or footnotes to "prove" this -- I readily admit it. I just don't hear it from other disciplines. Just my .002

[cfaith]

llg thanks for this comment.

"While some very qualified students have trouble getting into nursing school because the schools can't find enough clinical slots ... a lot of those slots are taken by schools who have very low admission standards. I talk to some students who are barely articulate and go to schools with bad reputations ... but there they are, occupying slots that could be used for more qualified students. The "industry" needs a good "shake out." We should all support our Boards of Nursing when they try to sanction and/or close down poorly performing schools -- of which there are many. That would make room for the good students."

It was the lack of being able to screen students and the inablity to dismiss students like this which lead me to leave teaching nursing after nearly 13 years. The individual students such as those you discribe are now who I deal with as a nurse educator in orientation. I too believe myself to be young! I'm only 46 now and left the CC system some 100 years ago. I took a lower paying job just to escape the stress and long hours. I feel as if I broke even.

Best of Luck to all Educators out there!

[llg, PhD, RN]

It was the lack of being able to screen students and the inablity to dismiss students like this which lead me to leave teaching nursing after nearly 13 years.

I see this as one of the biggest problems with nursing education today. There are too many nursing students who don't belong in nursing -- and faculty members are not allowed to flunk them. Faculty members complain to me about this on a regular basis.

We need to stop wasting our limited resources on such students -- and start prioritizing the needs of those who have a high likelihood of success as a nurse. That would help us make progress on a lot of problems within our profession.

[stephfy37]

As a nurse for 22 years with years of experiences in various icu's, & community health; I was insulted when I applied for teaching position only to be told I had no teaching experience. I completed my MSN-Edu in 2009, 2011 I am not teaching because the universities don't perform mentoring or want to give me experience. I am very disappointed with the nursing teaching profession, they claim they need nurse educators but don't want to mentor the new nurse educator. Needless to say I am fed-up with hearing about the shortage of nursing faculty. Enough already!!

[VickyRN, MSN, DNP, RN]

As a nurse for 22 years with years of experiences in various icu's, & community health; I was insulted when I applied for teaching position only to be told I had no teaching experience. I completed my MSN-Edu in 2009, 2011 I am not teaching because the universities don't perform mentoring or want to give me experience. I am very disappointed with the nursing teaching profession, they claim they need nurse educators but don't want to mentor the new nurse educator. Needless to say I am fed-up with hearing about the shortage of nursing faculty. Enough already!!

So sorry you had such a negative experience. I was very fortunate in my program, a very large baccalaureate nursing program in North Carolina, to be mentored for an entire year, once I became faculty within the program. My prior experience as a nursing instructor in an ADN community college program was not nearly as positive. I was not mentored at all, but just thrown into the classroom and into the clinical arena. Learning by the school of hard knocks is a rough way to go. I would much prefer to be mentored.

[CrunchRN, ADN, RN]

I wouldn't worry about it. We are so over-producing nurses that a slow down of these for profit schools for lack of faculty would be great!

[Streamline2010]

I see this as one of the biggest problems with nursing education today. There are too many nursing students who don't belong in nursing -- and faculty members are not allowed to flunk them. Faculty members complain to me about this on a regular basis.

We need to stop wasting our limited resources on such students -- and start prioritizing the needs of those who have a high likelihood of success as a nurse. That would help us make progress on a lot of problems within our profession.

Why can't you flunk them? Do they all keep getting passing grades in sprite of your best attempts, or what? >;D

Nursing, as a profession, created its own problems for itself by fixating on some very rigid and antiquated concepts of what type of person "belongs" in nursing. I am a woman, I endured almost one full year of RN school, and although I began with great pride and great enthusiasm, I was completely disgusted and bored by it after about 9-10 months. I found the instructors and the administration to be boring, one-dimensional, holyrollers who, when you get right down to it, had lived a very, very constrained life of church, children, marriage, and nursing. I wanted to hit the ground running, have a very intense, efficient, and no-BS curriculum of how to do the job of Nurse. Vocational. Technical. Efficient. What I got was almost a year of lecture-blather that was a total waste of time (Honey, ahh cay-un read mah OWN textbooks, Bless Yor Haaart, Dear) so please stop with the boring hours of drone, and turn us loose to go home and study, thanks, 'k, 'Bye. And a meandering curriculum that was so chopped-up and nonsensical that all I can think, is the school wanted to pad and stretch out 15 months worth of training to 24 months, so as to get more billable hours.

Oh, and they did flunk out a lot of students along the way. Nursing I got all the single moms who had to do their own parenting plus go to school and maybe work a job, too, as well as the usual party dolls who spent all of their break time on Facebook, and a few hapless men who, well, being men, just kind of wanted to know exactly when all of this blather was ev-ah going to cut to the chase, and said so. Nursing II got a lot of the average-intellect students who just were always kind of confused about what they were supposed to be learning (I was confused, too, but I memorize stuff well), and also cleared most over-age-45 students, and all the remaining guys except 4, and the people who really had to work to be able to pay for school. Oh, and most of the tatoo'd people, too. The class got a lot more homogenous and youthful and white and female and tatto-less after Nursing II. Nurs III, well, I didn't finish that due to "conducts" that consisted of one late care plan concept map, one missed clinical that the school had changed the date for and never notified me, and one conduct for my telling them exactly what I thought of the whole mess, including their exams that full 75% - 80% of the class could not pass.

I think the people who say that nursing education needs to vastly increase the diversity of instructors, and also teach more practical skills are exactly right. I'm not sorry that I'm out of it. It's nice to go back to normal people and not be burdened by such an adversarial faculty and administration, anymore.

I am a baby boomer, the very youngest edge of it, and nursing school bored me to the max. Women who have worked in nursing their whole lives seem to have tunnel vision. I know that I read in one of my books in Nursing I read that "nurses tend to socialize only with other nurses," "and nurses go home burned out and stressed out at the end of the day," etc. I read that in a textbook!, in my required reading, and the first thing I thought is: Well, I don't want that job.

[joyouter]

Just because a person's good at something doesn't automatically make them a good teacher -- I've worked with people that were blindingly brilliant, but couldn't "dumb it down" enough to tell you how to make toast. Most of us with some initials after our names remember certain professors with fondness -- because the truly good ones were so rare.

I personally think that the ability to teach is like the ability to lead -- you're either a leader or a teacher, or you're not. You can learn to be a boss or an instructor, but leaders and teachers are born, not made. And churning out a bunch of instructors who are going for the job because they're looking at summers, weekends and holidays off isn't going to help anybody (the equivalent of the people I went to nursing school with who wanted to be travel nurses and CRNAs, but couldn't pass A&P II).

I also think we need to seriously look at what the BSN level classwork is. We're putting in a lot of "management" stuff, at least in the programs I've seen. Let people do what they are best at. If you want to be a manager, go get at MBA or a MPH. I think we need more psych, more patho, more "stuff" that will keep the patient alive at 3 am when you can't get a MD on the phone and your patient's crashing. I'd like to see classes that revolved around labs -- seeing what set of labs means what, not just "oh, Mr. J's K is 2.5. he'll be getting some riders," but what to look for in a patient with cancer that could mean it's mets'd to the bone, or that maybe you need to back off the Diprivan a little on a person who's lipid panel looks like A, B, or C. I can't even get someone to give me a straight and consistent answer on when a person needs to be on reverse isolation -- some talk numbers, some talk ratios of numbers.

Sorry, it's been a rough week.

Excellent points. Nursing education, management and development paradigms must adapt to the realities of today. Many nursing schools maintain a curriculum which is out of touch with today's needs. This does not mean that the traditional caring qne evidence based research approach has to be replaced. Rather the fact that the glass ceiling of senior nursing management and educators seemingly elect to keep that in place- why or why eat your young.! Bright, reflective, nurses with lots of EQ and oriented to the professional practice leave, possibly with foregone conclusions about a limited future. The politicization of nursing is one of the most damaging shifts imaginable, fostering unhappiness, punitive behaviours and bullying within the profession at all levels. We need to identify our weaknesses, address them,, learn how to correct them in order to be enabled to move past this dark side of nursing towards positive change and dynamics.

[fantasyworld]

I see this as one of the biggest problems with nursing education today. There are too many nursing students who don't belong in nursing -- and faculty members are not allowed to flunk them. Faculty members complain to me about this on a regular basis.

We need to stop wasting our limited resources on such students -- and start prioritizing the needs of those who have a high likelihood of success as a nurse. That would help us make progress on a lot of problems within our profession.

I have 2 part time jobs. One at the bedside (4 days a week) and the other as a clinical instructor(3 days a week). I have always wanted to be a teacher but in 1978 when there was no financial aid for teaching majors I went into nursing. I have enjoyed many years in the profession but recently became frustrated with health care as a whole. I wanted to teach nursing but found out that in addition to paying for my MSN, I would be rewarded with a pay scale $7/ hr less than what I'm earning at my other job. I work the bedside job for financial reasons and teach clinical for my emotional well being. Since I see both sides of the coin, I think I bring a perspective to teaching of "being there in the trenches and understanding discrepancies between school and job realities".

The above quoted comment is valid. Schools need to accept students to stay viable. A perspective student may present themselves to the interview with the ability to appear like a perfect candidate but then show their really not interested in nursing.... just a means to an end for their job hunt.

The facility I teach for just had their NLN survey and their acceptance vs graduating #'s mattered quite a bit. Once a student is in, they're our problem. School financial aid and reimbursements were directly affected by these numbers.

Clinical facilities are another problem. I've seen students from some schools assigned with a preceptor on a unit where the preceptor is paid to precept so when a group of students come in with their instructor, the staff aren't willing to work with them because they aren't getting paid.

I work at my bedside job with a number of new nurses that feel it's beneath them to come out from behind the desk and touch patients. They say they were taught to be "in charge" and yet they don't know a rectal from a tympanic thermometer {exaggeration alert}, but you know what I mean.

Health care is broken. Those making the rules are out of touch. When nurses voices are heard, then and only then can we fix this system.

[hope3456, ASN, RN]

Why can't you flunk them? Do they all keep getting passing grades in sprite of your best attempts, or what? >;D

GOOD ONE STREAMLINE!!! Pretty sure I was one of those students! Loved your post as well.

I am not personally concerned about the ' upcoming shortage of nursing instructors' - apparently there was enough available to create the current 'glut' of new grads. My concern is that the 'powers that be' need to get currently (and recently) graduating students into nursing jobs where they gain relevant experience so they can pass it on. Not happening.

IMHO the whole structure of nursing school needs to be revamped.