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The Nurse Faculty Shortage

The number of nurses the United States produces is capped less by how many people want to become nurses than by how many people are available to teach them. That constraint is the nurse faculty shortage, and it operates on a decade-long lag, which is why it gets less attention than the vacancies it eventually causes.

The size of it

The national survey of vacant faculty positions found a vacancy rate of 7.2 percent, representing 1,588 unfilled full-time faculty posts across 863 schools of nursing. Schools also reported needing to create about 150 further positions to meet student demand, so the true gap is larger than the vacancy count alone.

The consequence shows up at the admissions desk. Nursing schools turned away 92,672 qualified applications in 2025, including 6,496 to master's programmes and 10,359 to doctoral programmes. Faculty shortages are the reason schools most often give, alongside a shortage of clinical placement sites, preceptors, classroom space and budget.

Different published figures for applications turned away are not contradictions. They count different programme levels in different years, and the count is of applications rather than of individual people, since one applicant may apply to several schools. The scale is what matters: tens of thousands of qualified applications refused annually for want of capacity.

The mechanism is pay

A master's-prepared nurse teaching in a school of nursing averages $82,762 a year. The same qualification in clinical practice has a median of $132,050. That difference of $49,288 is the entire problem in one line, and no amount of appeals to vocation closes it.

The gap is worse than it looks for two reasons. Faculty posts usually require a graduate degree the clinical post does not, so the teacher has paid more for the privilege of earning less. And the highest-paid clinical alternative, advanced practice, is growing fast, which keeps pulling candidates the other way. See registered nurse pay.

The demography is worse than the vacancy rate

Faculty are older than the workforce they teach. Average ages for doctorally prepared faculty run to 60.2 years for professors, 55.0 for associate professors and 48.9 for assistant professors. The share of nursing faculty at or above 65 doubled from 16.9 percent in 2017 to 34.2 percent in 2024.

A third of the teaching workforce being at retirement age is a different kind of problem from a vacancy rate. Vacancies can be filled by recruitment. A retirement wave has to be replaced by people who do not exist yet.

Why it cannot be fixed quickly

Filling a faculty post requires a nurse who has completed a doctorate, or at minimum a master's, and who will then accept a substantial pay cut. Doctoral enrolment in nursing has fallen for eleven consecutive years, to 4,077 students. Every year that number shrinks sets a ceiling on class sizes roughly a decade later, because that is how long it takes to earn the credential and gain the experience the post expects.

There is a second bottleneck outside the schools entirely. Clinical placement capacity is set by hospitals and other employers, not by faculties, so a school that somehow hired the teachers it needs could still be unable to place the students. An employer that can take more students is directly enlarging the workforce it will later recruit from.

How it connects to everything downstream

The pipeline arithmetic runs like this. Applications are plentiful. Places are capped by faculty and placements. Fewer of those who graduate pass the licensing examination on the first attempt than a few years ago. Meanwhile the existing workforce has a median age of 50 and about four in ten working nurses expect to retire or leave within five years.

That is why hospital hiring for the next several years will mostly be a competition for nurses who are already licensed rather than an intake of new graduates. See the nursing shortage and nurse turnover and retention.

Nurses who move into teaching also count as a workforce shift in their own right: the share of registered nurses whose primary role is nursing education rose from 2.1 percent to 3.2 percent in two years, which is good news for the pipeline and one more nurse off a hospital rota each time.

Sources

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