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BLOOMINGTON, Ill. (AP) — With her advanced degrees, Amanda Hopkins could make a lot more money as a practicing nurse rather than as an assistant professor of nursing at Illinois Wesleyan University.
But Hopkins, in her second year at IWU, says, "For right now, this fits for me . because my passion fits it."
"I love being able to see that translation of theory into practice" with students she has in the classroom and in a clinical setting, Hopkins said. "To me, it's immediate gratification. Did it make sense for them? Did my teaching strategy connect with their learning strategy?"
With a looming nationwide nursing shortage, the challenge for nursing schools is to find more people with Hopkins' passion to teach the next generation of nurses.
A faculty shortage was cited by more than two-thirds of nursing schools responding to a recent American Association of Colleges of Nursing (AACN) survey as a reason why all qualified applicants were not accepted into their baccalaureate programs.
The Illinois Board of Higher Education awards Nurse Educator Fellowships each year as a way to retain well-qualified nursing faculty.
Hopkins and Ed Reitz, an assistant professor of nursing at Illinois State University, were among 22 recipients this year.
Hopkins already had looked into professional development opportunities and a potential research project when she received a letter telling her the $10,000 salary supplement that is supposed to be part of the fellowship would not be awarded this year for budgetary reasons.
The money has been frozen as "non-essential spending" under an executive order from the governor, according to an IBHE spokesman.
Even without the money, the recognition is nice, said Reitz, but he also was pleased to see ISU's online nursing program — which he teaches — listed among the top 100 Best Online Nursing Programs by U.S. News and World Report earlier this year.
Both Hopkins and Reitz are the first people in their families to graduate from college.
Reitz grew up on Bloomington's west side and graduated from ISU in 1982 — with a criminal justice degree.
Reitz took what he describes as a "zigzag" path that led to nursing, then teaching, after earlier positions as a social worker and detoxification counselor.
He considers it a "dream job." He likes the "educational stimulation" and the students. "They're young and they keep me young being around them."
Catherine Miller, interim dean of ISU's Mennonite College of Nursing, said although the number of doctoral graduates in nursing is increasing, so are the opportunities.
Full, associate and assistant professors at ISU are required to have doctoral degrees; instructional professors, who teach the bulk of undergraduate classes must have master's degrees, Miller said.
IWU requires its full-time nursing faculty to have doctoral degrees.
Filling positions is "very difficult," agreed Vickie Folse, director of IWU's School of Nursing.
An opening in the sociology department, for example, might attract hundreds of qualified applicants, she said.
"With nursing, we get fewer than 10 that meet the qualifications," Folse said.
Nursing salaries
The problem is nationwide. The limited pool of doctoral-prepared faculty was cited by 31.4 percent of schools responding to the AACN survey on the difficulty in finding nursing faculty. Noncompetitive salaries, compared to those in nursing practice, was cited by 28.4 percent.
At ISU, the starting salary for an assistant professor ranges from $70,000 to $74,000 depending on experience, expertise and years of teaching, according to Miller.
By comparison, a nurse practitioner can make $85,000 to $90,000 a year.
Folse declined to release salary information for IWU because it is a private institution, but she said starting salaries are above regional and national averages.
Salaries at Heartland Community College are governed by a collective bargaining agreement and vary according to experience and teaching load, said Becky LaMont, Heartland's dean of health and human services.
A nine-month faculty position can range from about $45,000 to nearly $50,000, she said, with summer teaching assignments putting it into the $50,000 range.
But salaries and a shortage of doctorally-prepared nurses are only part of the problem.
Nationally, the average age of nursing professors is 61 and the average age of associate professors in nearly 58, Miller said.
"Within the next 5 to 10 years, we're going to see a huge turnover due to retirement," Miller said.
A shortage of clinical sites also limits the ability of programs to grow. The Twin City schools use clinical sites in Peoria, Springfield and elsewhere in addition to Bloomington-Normal.
The three nursing programs work well together, particularly in sharing clinical sites, according to the heads of the programs.
LaMont said in her travels to other parts of the state, she has not always seen the same "collaborative, supportive relationship" among schools.
"We trust each other," Miller said. "We're focused on the health outcome of the patients and the educating the best nurses that we can."
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Source: The (Bloomington) Pantagraph, http://bit.ly/1FkwmYZ
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Information from: The Pantagraph, http://www.pantagraph.com
This is an Illinois Exchange story offered by The (Bloomington) Pantagraph.
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