berylmac

Hi! I am starting my 4th year as an associate professor of nursing at an Oregon rural community college ADN program. I am a MSN with 23 years of clinical experience in addition to being a professional educator for 34 years. I love nursing and teaching, but due to the demeaning low salary of a nurse educator, ($41k) this will be my last year at the college. I also teach and consult in project management and I make $125 an hour so I will be leaving nursing in order to be financially secure. It is ironic that I need to leave a profession that I love and contribute substantially to in order to be financially stable. As a profession and nation of consumers, we had better wake up and take action to recruit and retain qualified nurse educators with comparable market value to that of middle to upper nurse managers. If we don't - we all will lose!

As a mastered prepared nurse educator with 23 years of clinical experience, I am currently making $41K a year as an associate professor of nursing at an Oregon rural community college ADN program. This is my third and, most likely, my final year as a nursing professor due to the low pay and demanding work load. Our new graduates start at $65K at the local community hospital. Our faculty to student ratio in the classroom is 1:63 while the clinical ratio is 1:10, meeting the state requirement. As a full time nursing faculty, in addition to classroom teaching, I am also expected to mentor a 2nd year clinical group, with 2 hours of lab time and 10 hours of clinical supervision. I am exhausted working every evening and weekend grading papers, projects and doing research to keep current with the latest evidenced-based practices in nursing. In Oregon, the professional nurses organization has an initiative to support increasing the numbers of registered nurses graduating from programs in order to meet the ever increasing demand for qualified nurses in all fields of nursing. As a nation and profession, we are in dire straights to recruit and retain qualified nurse educators in our nursing programs. If we don't demand comparable market value salaries for nurse educators, we, as a nation of consumers can expect the quality and availability of nursing care to dramatically diminish on a yearly basis.