HomeFeaturesThe Alarming Nursing Educator Shortage

The Alarming Nursing Educator Shortage

“We have a lot of aspiring nurses who are in the pipeline, but they can’t get into nursing school because of the lack of capacity in nursing faculty.”

Edmund J.Y. Pajarillo, Professor Emeritus, College of Nursing and Public Health at Adelphi University

Across the United States, the nursing workforce crisis is being fueled by a lesser-known but deeply consequential problem: a severe shortage of nurse educators. While demand for nurses continues to rise, nursing schools are unable to expand enrollment fast enough to meet workforce needs.

According to the American Association of Colleges of Nursing (AACN), tens of thousands of qualified nursing school applicants are turned away each year, primarily due to insufficient faculty, limited clinical training sites, and constrained classroom capacity. The result is a bottleneck in the pipeline, one that restricts the number of new nurses entering the profession at a time when they are needed most.

This faculty shortage is not a short-term challenge. AACN reports hundreds of unfilled full-time nursing faculty positions nationwide, along with a persistent vacancy rate that limits schools’ ability to grow. Compounding the issue is an aging nurse educator workforce, with faculty’s average age steadily rising. As senior educators approach retirement, the system urgently needs to recruit, prepare, and retain the next generation of academic nursing leaders to sustain and expand nursing education.

Dr. Edmund J.Y. Pajarillo, professor emeritus in the College of Nursing and Public Health, has spent decades examining and addressing this very intersection of nursing education, leadership, and workforce development. He emphasizes that the faculty shortage is inseparable from the broader nursing shortage itself: “There really is a severe academic nurse educator shortage, and this is closely tied in with a shortage of nurses.” In his view, strengthening nursing education is one of the most direct and impactful ways to stabilize and grow the healthcare workforce.

Dr. Pajarillo also points to a painful paradox in nursing education today. “We have a lot of aspiring nurses who are in the pipeline, but they can’t get into nursing school because of the lack of capacity in nursing faculty,” he explains.

At the same time, he warns that the average age of nurse educators continues to rise, with many current faculty members belonging to the baby boomer generation and nearing retirement.

For Dr. Pajarillo, this moment represents both a crisis and an opportunity—one that calls for strategic investment in mentorship, leadership development, and nursing informatics to prepare the educators and nurse leaders of the future.

Meet the Expert: Edmund J. Y. Pajarillo, PhD, RN, NI-BC, CPHQ, NEA-BC, ANEF, FAAN

Dr. Edmund J.Y. Pajarillo is a professor emeritus in the College of Nursing and Public Health at Adelphi University. He is recognized for a distinguished career in nursing leadership, informatics, quality, and mental health and holds multiple advanced board certifications, including Nurse Executive, Advanced; Nursing Informatics; and Certified Practitioner in Healthcare Quality, reflecting decades of expertise in executive nursing practice, healthcare systems, and patient safety.

Dr. Pajarillo has served in senior academic, administrative, and clinical roles, including department chair for graduate nursing studies, associate dean for faculty services, chief nursing executive, director of nursing education and administration, compliance officer, and patient care manager.

Dr. Pajarillo’s clinical background spans trauma, psychiatric and mental health nursing across the lifespan, dialysis, transplant services, long-term care, and home care. His scholarship centers on the intersection of nursing informatics, leadership, and mentoring, emphasizing the strategic use of data, technology, and evidence-based practice to strengthen nursing education, develop future nurse leaders, enhance quality of care, and improve patient safety.

Challenges in Attracting and Retaining Nurse Educators

One of the biggest barriers to recruiting nurse educators is the persistent pay gap between academic roles and clinical practice: As Dr. Pajarillo explains, “There’s a real salary inequity between nurses who work in academia and those in the healthcare industry, and that alone is not very attractive to nurses who might otherwise consider teaching.”

Even nurses who are interested in education often find that faculty salaries are not competitive enough to justify a career shift or even part-time involvement. In some cases, he notes, the salaries of newly graduated nurses outpace those of seasoned faculty, creating a discouraging dynamic in which less-experienced clinicians can earn more than the educators who trained them. “It can feel demeaning,” he says, especially when new graduates are financially incentivized to teach before they’ve had time to build deep clinical expertise.

At the institutional level, universities often lack the flexibility and resources to close this compensation gap. “Even if you’re great at what you do, you can only earn within the salary range tied to your rank,” Dr. Pajarillo notes, pointing to rigid pay structures that limit merit-based or market-based adjustments. Many academic institutions are constrained by across-the-board salary policies and concerns about equity across departments, making it difficult to prioritize higher pay for nursing faculty without generating internal tension.

Dr. Pajarillo notes that while some schools can offer signing bonuses or incentive funds, not all institutions have access to endowments or discretionary budgets to support these efforts. The result is a system that often recognizes the value of nurse educators in principle, but struggles to back that recognition with sustainable financial investment.

Impact of Burnout and Turnover on the Nursing Profession

Burnout and early-career turnover continue to weaken the nursing workforce, even as schools graduate thousands of new nurses each year. A 2024 study in The Online Journal of Issues in Nursing found that a substantial number of new registered nurses leave the profession within their first one to two years, often due to heavy workloads, emotional exhaustion, limited organizational support, and poor transition-to-practice experiences. As a result, steady graduation numbers do not translate into a stable workforce; shortages persist as new nurses exit faster than they can be replaced.

Dr. Pajarillo has observed this trend throughout his career: “New graduates typically stay an average of only two years, and then they disappear,” he says. “Every year we graduate thousands of nursing students from nursing schools, but after two years, we’re back to the shortage.” He also points out the troubling paradox of hospitals recruiting nurses from other countries while domestically trained nurses leave due to burnout and workplace strain.

According to Dr. Pajarillo, nurses who leave often do so because of increased workload, insufficient mentoring, long and ineffective orientation periods, and the perceived apathy of nursing administrators. He notes that many of these nurses performed well academically and passed licensure exams with strong results, yet exited the profession quietly, making it difficult to study their experiences or understand where they go.

For him, addressing turnover requires deeper research into nurse attrition, stronger transition-to-practice support, and systemic changes that improve leadership engagement, mentoring, and long-term job sustainability.

Proposed Solutions for the Nursing Educator Shortage

To address the growing nurse educator shortage and its ripple effects across the healthcare system, Dr. outlines five interconnected solutions. Rather than relying on isolated fixes, he emphasizes coordinated action across education, healthcare organizations, government, and professional groups.

Dual Appointments and Stronger Partnerships Between Academia and Healthcare

Dr. Pajarillo emphasizes the importance of closer collaboration between nursing schools and healthcare organizations. One key strategy is offering dual appointments, allowing academic faculty who supervise clinical training to also hold formal roles within healthcare systems: “If I were an assistant professor in a university and doing clinical preceptorship in a hospital, appoint me as a visiting assistant professor there as well,” he explains.

These shared positions can provide supplemental income, strengthen professional relationships, and enhance opportunities for promotion and tenure while ensuring that nursing education remains closely connected to real-world practice.

Government-Led Consortium of Key Stakeholders

Rather than tackling the nurse educator shortage in isolated efforts, Dr. Pajarillo calls for a government-led consortium that brings together major stakeholders across academia, healthcare systems, policymakers, and professional organizations. “Addressing them individually has not been effective,” he notes.

By creating a unified forum for collaboration, these groups can develop shared recommendations and coordinated strategies that are viable across sectors and can produce long-term solutions.

Public Awareness and the Critical Retention Window

Dr. Pajarillo stresses that public understanding of the nurse educator shortage is essential, particularly its direct connection to the broader nursing workforce crisis.

He also highlights research showing that the first two years of practice are the most vulnerable period for nurse burnout and attrition. “If we really want to keep nurses in the industry, we need to focus our work on that second year,” he says. Targeted mentoring, workload support, and leadership engagement during this window could dramatically improve retention.

Policy and Funding Priorities

For lasting change, Dr. Pajarillo believes policymakers must place greater emphasis on nursing education and faculty development. “If our policymakers truly prioritized the shortage of nurse educators, we would see improvement in the nursing crisis,” he explains.

Increased funding for faculty salaries, incentives, training programs, and academic/clinical partnerships would help schools expand capacity and attract experienced nurses into teaching roles.

Better Preparation and Pathways for Nurse Practitioners (NPs) as Educators

Lastly, Dr. Pajarillo identifies nurse practitioners as a strong potential solution to faculty shortages. “There’s an abundance of NPs right now, and they can be excellent complementary faculty members,” he says.

Post-master’s programs in nursing education allow NPs to gain teaching credentials efficiently, while flexible clinical schedules enable them to balance practice and instruction. He also encourages professional organizations to actively promote education and training, making teaching a core leadership pathway within nursing.

Kimmy Gustafson

Writer

Among her many diverse writing endeavors, Kimmy Gustafson has also lent her expertise to NPSchools.com since 2020, providing insightful and engaging content about the significant role of education in shaping our future generations of nurse practitioners. Many of her pieces include interviewing experts on timely topics such as healthcare workplace violence and moral distress.

Kimmy has been a freelance writer for more than a decade, writing hundreds of articles on a wide variety of topics such as startups, nonprofits, healthcare, kiteboarding, the outdoors, and higher education. She is passionate about seeing the world and has traveled to over 27 countries. She holds a bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of Oregon. When not working, she can be found outdoors, parenting, kiteboarding, or cooking.