Nursing senior Jacob Hantla said when he graduates, he will go to work in a cardiovascular intensive care unit -- a job that two or three years ago would have required years of experience.
Before nursing students like Hantla even get their degrees, they often receive job offers, complete with signing bonuses or offers to pay off student loans, due to the high demand for nurses in Arizona.
"It's cool for new graduates, but it's difficult for nursing overall," Hantla said.
The shortage of nurses isn't just restricted to hospitals.
It extends into the classroom, where there simply aren't enough faculty nationwide to teach all of the qualified applicants, according to a report released by the American Association of Colleges of Nursing.
Terry Olbrysh, a spokesman for the ASU College of Nursing, said the faculty shortage is the heart of the problem.
"The shortage of educators is more significant than the shortage of nurses," he said.
Olbrysh said a few factors contribute to the problem. Those include the amount of competition in the Valley for a limited pool of qualified applicants and the simple fact that it is difficult to become a nursing educator.
Bernadette Melnyk, dean of the College of Nursing, agreed with Olbrysh, though she said ASU has had no problems recruiting qualified applicants. She added she has hired 23 new faculty members since becoming of dean in January 2005.
"We have far more applicants than faculty positions," she said. "We're really fortunate to have enough faculty to offer our students a quality education."
Olbrysh said one consequence of the shortage for students was it increases competition among applicants.
"We find that our criteria for acceptance keeps going up, and the students keep improving," he said. "It produces more competition to be admitted, both here and everywhere."
Melnyk named another issue that compounds the situation.
"The issue ... is also the number of clinical placement sites," she said. "Hospitals are inundated with requests for student placements."
Doctoral student Diana Jacobson said she thought salary was also a contributing factor.
"It's difficult to work and raise a family and pay bills," she said. "There are fewer people that want to go into teaching. You can make $30,000 more in the private sector."
Jacobson taught in the College of Nursing for 10 years before she decided to go back to school to get her doctorate.
"In order to do the best job possible, I needed the Ph.D.," she said.
But Jacobson acknowledges she is in the minority.
"There are fewer nurses going back to school for graduate degrees," she said.
Charity Hantla, Jacob's wife, is also a nursing senior. She agreed that the monetary aspect affected the numbers of nurses wanting to go into teaching.
"There are probably less faculty because they are paid less," she said. "You can make more money in management somewhere else."
Despite that, both Charity and Jacob said they would be interested in teaching someday.
"I think it would be really fun to start off with new nurses," Charity said.
Jacob did find one benefit to the shortage.
"You get teachers who really want to teach," he said. "You don't have teachers that couldn't do anything else."
Reach the reporter at andrea.adams@asu.edu.
