More than 200,000 new nurses are needed annually through 2031 to replace nurses leaving the workforce,1 yet the latest data from the American Association of Colleges of Nursing (AACN)'s annual national survey on nursing program admissions reflects a troubling reality: 92,672 qualified applications to baccalaureate and graduate nursing programs were turned away in 2025.2
Qualified to enter and needed by the workforce, over 90,000 applicants still could not become students in nursing programs last year. Why are nursing programs forced to turn students away? To answer, let's start with the inverse question: What has to be in place for a program to accept them?
The State of the Nurse Faculty Shortage
In 2025, the AACN identified 1,588 full-time faculty vacancies across responding nursing schools, plus another 150 positions needed to accommodate student demand.2 Filling them requires a replacement pool that is becoming harder to replenish.
A substantial share of the nursing-faculty workforce is nearing retirement. Faculty age 65 or older accounted for 34.2% of the workforce in 2024, twice the population in 2017, while fewer nurses ages 18 to 39 entered or remained in faculty roles.2 On top of the aging faculty is an increased demand for specialization. In 2025, 80.9% of reported faculty vacancies required or preferred doctoral preparation, while enrollment in the PhD programs declined for the 11th consecutive year.2
And a shortage of nursing faculty is only one side of the equation. The other is faculty capacity. When a position remains open, that work is rarely redistributed one-for-one. Course coverage may shift to another educator, an adjunct may take on a section, or other faculty responsibilities may be delayed or reassigned to make room for the immediate need.1
Follow these gaps across a nursing program's annual hiring, curriculum, budget, and enrollment decisions, and the severity of the shortage becomes much more complicated than "we have three open positions to fill this academic year."
Nursing Program Capacity Under Faculty Constraints
Which brings us back to our original inquiry: What has to be true for a program to successfully continue admitting qualified students?
Say you're a dean trying to make room for the next cohort, with a limited reserve of faculty to pull from. Every available option suddenly requires critical analysis of available resources alongside a potential tradeoff.
The Calculations Facing Nursing Program Leaders:
| The Question at Hand | The Capacity Tradeoff |
| Can we admit another cohort? | Give another clinical group to an existing educator, and their capacity to plan curriculum diminishes. |
| Can we maintain current enrollment? | Bring in an adjunct, and a current faculty member has to carve out time to onboard and coordinate with them. |
| Can this course or specialty run as designed? | Shift an educator into unfamiliar content, and their clinical expertise may come with an immediate need for preparation and instructional support. |
| What can we postpone? | Reassign someone from advising, assessment, or curriculum work, and the staffing problem sees relief while the work they leave behind remains. |
| Which risks can we absorb? | Reduce a section or clinical group to protect capacity, and students’ progression and graduation timelines change. |
| How do we retain current faculty? | Ask faculty to absorb additional responsibilities, and the workload that preserves capacity today may make that capacity harder to retain over time. |
With current projections extending the nurse educator shortage over the next decade, these decisions are unlikely to disappear.2 But programs are not waiting for the faculty pipeline to fully replenish to find new, resourceful ways to educate qualified students and prepare the next generation of nurses.
How Are Institutions Reconfiguring Capacity?
Several programs are narrowing the boundary between academic and clinical nursing so educational capacity can draw more directly from the workforce.2 Through new partnerships and pathways into teaching, they are expanding who can contribute to nursing education and how that expertise is used.
Dedicated Education Units
Dedicated Education Units, or DEUs, are one example of this. Rather than relying exclusively on a faculty member to provide direct supervision to a defined clinical group, DEUs formally involve prepared nurses within the practice setting in student learning. Faculty remain responsible for curriculum alignment, oversight, student evaluation, and support for the clinical educators, while the clinical unit becomes an intentional teaching environment.
One example is Dominican University in River Forest, Illinois, which operates a DEU in partnership with Rush Oak Park Hospital. Through the partnership, Rush Oak Park's nurses serve as clinical educators, providing students with direct teaching and supervision in practice while Dominican faculty retain academic oversight. The setup allows Dominican faculty to continue overseeing students' clinical education while relieving workload. The model also adds a layer of peer support. Junior students return as seniors to take on peer mentoring and clinical leadership roles alongside incoming junior students. With teaching and supervision distributed across these roles, Dominican expanded to welcome more than 32 new juniors into the DEU in the fall of 2024.3
Joint Appointments
Other academic-practice partnerships create shared roles for nurses across clinical practice and nursing education. Through joint appointments, a nurse can contribute clinical expertise to student education while maintaining a role within the practice setting, expanding teaching capacity without requiring a complete transition from clinical practice into academia.
The model has emerged as a priority in academic-practice workforce planning. At the 2024 Center for Nursing Equity and Excellence (CNEE) strategic planning summit, joint appointments received more support from participating nursing and health-system leaders than any other academic-practice partnership strategy.4 These arrangements are already operating across multiple institutions. The North Carolina AHEC Clinical Instructor Partnership Program has facilitated more than 20 shared partnerships, while the University of Maryland School of Nursing collaborates with 22 regional hospitals to share faculty workloads.2
Clinician-To-Adjunct Pathways
Clinical instructor and adjunct roles offer another way for practicing nurses to enter nursing education without immediately leaving the bedside. Nurses can begin developing teaching experience while continuing in clinical practice, creating a more gradual transition into academia.
To support this pathway, national frameworks focus on transitioning expert bedside practitioners into clinical teaching roles. The AACN highlights efforts to transition bedside nurses into clinical faculty roles, including clearer pathways into academia and state financial and tax incentives for clinical nurse educators and preceptors. For programs facing a limited full-time faculty pipeline, these structured clinician-to-adjunct pathways provide a low-risk entry point for clinical experts to develop teaching competencies while maintaining active bedside practice.1
These models are among several promising paths forward, but they do not eliminate the need for qualified faculty. Which brings us to another part of the equation: What conditions support nurse educator retention?
Retaining the Faculty Nursing Programs Rely On
Programs can only stretch existing faculty capacity so far. However programs reorganize clinical teaching or extend coverage, faculty still have to carry the academic responsibility for educating students. That makes retention a critical part of the capacity equation. Yet in a national study of 588 full-time nursing faculty, 40.3% reported being likely or very likely to leave their position within the next three years.1
So, faculty retention becomes a question of reciprocity. Few faculty roles are likely to offer every condition in equal measure. A manageable workload may exist alongside limited advancement, strong compensation alongside poor collegial support, or demanding work alongside parts of the role an educator deeply values. The calculus of faculty retention lies in how those conditions accumulate. Recent research on intent to stay gives us a way to examine those factors.
What Influences Faculty Retention in Nursing Education?
A 2026 qualitative doctoral study at Southeastern University took an investigative approach to faculty retention. Rather than measuring intent to leave across a national sample, nurse educator Dana Lynn Crowder interviewed 10 faculty members teaching in ADN and BSN programs to understand the experiences that influenced them to stay. After transcribing the interviews and having participants review them for accuracy, Crowder coded their responses for recurring patterns.5
Across Crowder's interviews, one of the strongest reasons faculty gave for staying was their connection to students. Teaching, mentoring, and watching students develop into nurses gave educators a sense of purpose that continued to draw them to academic nursing.5
But that commitment to students exists alongside institutional conditions that can make staying more difficult. Workload, support during the transition into academia, opportunities to develop as an educator, and relationships with colleagues and administrators all shape the faculty experience.5
Through her conversations with nurse educators, Crowder identified four primary conditions that programs can actively shape to give faculty more reasons to stay: Work-life balance, self-efficacy, professional development and resources, and workplace culture and environment.5
Work-Life Balance
Faculty value the flexibility of academic schedules, but that flexibility can also blur the workday. Course preparation, grading, and other responsibilities can follow them home, making it difficult for the work to feel finished.5
Protecting faculty time can look like:
- Blocking course-preparation days from routine meetings and committee work
- Creating coverage plans so unexpected clinical absences don't fall to other faculty
- Treating a new course or curriculum revision as a workload tradeoff
- Setting boundaries around after-hours meetings and nonurgent requests
Self-Efficacy
New faculty are often learning to be educators while expected to perform as experienced ones. Mentors and supportive colleagues can help them navigate an unfamiliar academic role.5
Building faculty confidence can look like:
- Starting new educators in an established course with existing materials
- Assigning a designated faculty mentor with scheduled first-semester check-ins
- Building in observation or co-teaching before independent course responsibilities
- Deferring major course coordination during the transition into academia
Professional Development and Resources
Clinical expertise does not automatically translate into expertise in course design, assessment, student evaluation, or instruction. Faculty need time and resources to develop those skills while keeping their clinical knowledge current.5
Developing teaching expertise can look like:
- Providing protected development time before a clinician's first teaching assignment
- Training faculty in assessment design and clinical evaluation before independent practice
- Pairing newer educators with experienced faculty for assessment review
- Building time for clinical practice or specialty updates into faculty schedules
Workplace Culture and Environment
Faculty describe the work as more sustainable when they have accessible administrators, trusted colleagues, and meaningful relationships with students.5
Making that support reliable can look like:
- Holding recurring stay conversations about workload, support, and role more sustainability
- Giving faculty a clear process for escalating difficult student, clinical, or colleague situations
- Creating faculty teams that share difficult student progression and assessment decisions
- Accounting for student-development work in assignments, reviews, or advancement criteria
For programs unable to control the national faculty pipeline, the findings point to a different lever: the quality of the faculty experience that keeps educators returning year over year.5
Responding to the Nursing Faculty Shortage
The faculty shortage is expected to persist, leaving each nursing program to determine where it can create capacity within its own individual constraints.2 Fortunately, those decisions sit with deans, program leaders, and faculty who understand their institutions and the field well enough to know where there is room to rethink what is possible.
There may be no single path forward, but the objective is shared: make it possible to educate one more qualified student, then another, then another, continually replenishing a nursing workforce that needs them.
NCLEX® preparation often coincides with one of the busiest points in the academic term. When faculty are responsible for planning and delivering an intensive final review alongside their existing responsibilities, that preparation adds to an already demanding workload. Programs can protect faculty time by shifting that lift to a dedicated review led by outside nurse educators.
Request a demo below to explore UWorld's 3-Day NCLEX® Review, where UWorld nurse educators lead 24 focused modules designed to build student confidence and readiness while requiring minimal faculty time.
References
- Christianson, J., Malin, K., Leiberg, J., Grabert, L., Moser, S., & Zemlak, J. (2026). Educating to exhaustion: Intention to leave among US full-time nursing faculty retrieved from
- American Association of Colleges of Nursing (2026, August). Nursing faculty shortage fact sheet retrieved from
https://www.aacnnursing.org/news-data/fact-sheets/nursing-faculty-shortage
- Dominican University (2024, May 9). Nursing students complete first semester of training in new dedicated education unit at Rush Oak Park Hospital retrieved from
- Minnesota Center for Nursing Equity and Excellence. (n.d.). Reports.
- Crowder, D. L. (2026). Experiences that influence nurse educators to stay [Doctoral dissertation, Southeastern University]. FireScholars.
