Shortage creates struggle to find nursing faculty

As faculty and lecturers retire, the IU School of Nursing struggles to replace them.

The school, which offers bachelor of nursing degrees on the Indianapolis, Bloomington and Columbus campuses, has 14 openings on its Web site.

Those positions were vacated by retiring faculty, said Judith Halstead, executive associate dean for academic affairs at the school.

The national average age of the nursing faculty is 55 to 56, which the school follows closely, she said.

Halstead said nationwide, schools are struggling to find nurses with advanced degrees.

A lot of nursing faculty are aging and retiring and there are not enough qualified younger faculty prepared to take their roles, Halstead said. Besides that, nurses make more money in the field rather than teaching.

Despite an increased interest in nursing, most states will have a nursing shortage by 2020, and Indiana could have a 32 percent shortage by that time, according a U.S. Department of Health and Human Resources report “Nursing Education in Five States: 2005.”

In some places, the increase of students and decrease of faculty affects the ability of a school to expand, she said. Students just can’t get in because there are a lack of teachers in the classroom and the clinic.

She said it’s not exactly the case at IU because the nursing school expanded enrollment about 30 percent during the 2007-08 school year. The school is at capacity with about 1,000 undergraduates.

The number of faculty employed by IU stayed the same and might even shrink because of economic and budget reasons, but Clarian Health provided five nursing instructors to help with the expansion.

The school wants to prepare more students with advanced degrees, so it’s been applying for state and federal aid for scholarships to attract graduate students, Halstead said.

IU has about 450 graduate students on the Indianapolis campus.

“We’ve been pretty successful at writing grants and scholarship,” she said.

The school wants to fill all the positions by the fall, but probably won’t, Halstead said.

“We will continue to search and look until we fill them,” she said.