Nursing programs can’t fulfill demand

Good grades, check. Community service, check. Shadowing experience, check. Admission to nursing school, denied. 

With a 3.8 grade-point average, volunteer work and multiple shadowing experiences under her belt, Allyson Rene had good reason to be confident that she would be accepted to at least one of her two choice nursing programs.

With 2,000 job vacancies in Indiana in 2009, the demand for nurses is high. Yet Indiana’s nursing schools have to turn down 2,500 qualified applicants a year, according to the American Association of Retired Persons. 

Rene applied to the nursing programs at IU and IUPUI as a freshman last year.
However, Rene received letters of rejection from both of the programs, stating that the admissions process was more competitive than ever before.

“I was upset, and I think I got my hopes up too high,” Rene said. “I was shocked and thinking ‘What am I going to do now?’”

Deborah Hrisomalos, the assistant director of student services for the IU School of Nursing, said the school received 185 eligible applications out of 202 total applications for 60 available seats last fall. 

“It’s so weird that IU is so huge, yet they can only accommodate 60 people,” IU sophomore Heidi Grove said. “You would think they could accept more.”

Like Rene, Grove was not accepted into the IU-Bloomington nursing program.
Why are nursing programs across Indiana facing such a dilemma?

Because not only is there a shortage of nurses working in health care facilities, but there is also a shortage of qualified faculty to educate the large number of applicants, Hrisomalos said.

“I think it’s sheer numbers,” Hrisomalos said. “It’s because we have to have a faculty to student ratio of 1:10 for the clinical experiences.”

Faculty nurses are required to have obtained at least a master’s of science in nursing to teach part-time. Those who teach full-time are required to have a doctoral degree in nursing.

Eighty-eight percent of nursing programs in Indiana reported that recruitment of faculty members with a master’s degree was very difficult.

All nursing programs reported it to be very difficult to recruit those with doctorates, according to a survey of nursing programs in 2008 by Indiana Nursing Workforce Development Coalition.

“It’s no secret that the pay for nursing instructors is much less than those who work in the clinical settings,” said Bruce Wade, director of human resources for Bloomington Hospital.

It is hard to recruit nurses to leave higher-paying jobs to teach for a lower salary, Wade said.  

In response to the faculty shortage, Bloomington Hospital and IU-Bloomington School of Nursing formed a partnership that allows nurses who work in the hospital to serve as adjunct faculty as well.

Bloomington Hospital has helped by providing its trained staff for the nursing program as part-time instructors to keep the number of faculty up, Wade said.

Yet with the high demand for nurses, students like Grove continue to be baffled by admissions decisions.

“It’s proof that it’s not all about the grades,” Grove said. “But it still doesn’t make sense to me.”