The #I Cause of the Faculty Shortage?
By Fitzpatrick, Joyce J
WE ARE ALL AWARE OF THE NURSE FACULTY SHORTAGE, evidenced by the long waiting lists of qualified students for our programs and the fatigue we feel at the end of a long day of teaching. Although it may not be polite or politically correct to talk about money, we must break this unwritten rule. We must do something about the root cause of the nurse faculty shortage. Of course, there are perks to the academic role, but the discrepancies in pay compared to nurses in other positions will continue to be a deterrent to both recruitment and retention of nurse faculty. The data indicate that staff nurse salaries are higher than those of assistant professors, and that the salary for an independently employed nurse practitioner is 150 percent greater than that of a full professor in nursing (1). The NLN/Carnegie National Survey indicated that nurse practitioners with master’s preparation earned approximately 12 percent more than master’s-prepared faculty members in nursing (2).
There is too much wrong with this financial picture. We live in a knowledge-based economy. Thus, it should follow that those persons responsible for imparting knowledge – faculty should be paid the highest salaries. This is definitely not the case in nursing.
While a number of new programs are in place at the local, state, and federal levels to address the nurse faculty shortage, nothing will work without system change at the basic salary level. Faculty will continue to be recruited away from the academic ranks by higher salaries in clinical practice. Most importantly, we will not successfully recruit new graduates with clinical and research doctorates so long as they can command salaries at 150 percent above the full professor level in schools of nursing.
This may be another case in which nurse faculty should model the work of colleagues in medicine. Even in official data reported by the American Association of University Professors across all academic institutions at all ranks, data are not reported for medical school faculty (3). How did physicians become so special in academic institutions? And how can we learn from their salary models to increase nurse faculty compensation?
No doubt some answers are related to the overall compensation level for physicians in clinical practice and the model of clinician- educator in schools of medicine. Models of compensation also vary in other professional schools, such as business and law.
We have much to learn, but without acknowledging the basic problem of low salaries it is difficult to move forward. Faculty recruitment programs that do not attend to systemic change in the remuneration of faculty are shortsighted. We know that recruitment is only one side of the coin in hospital nurse staffing; retention of seasoned staff nurses is equally important. So it is with faculty…. One only has to follow the money to understand the faculty shortage.
We have much to learn, but without acknowledging the basic problem of low salaries it is difficult to move forward. Faculty recruitment programs that do not attend to systemic change in the remuneration of faculty are shortsighted.
References
1. National League for Nursing. (2005). Nurse faculty shortage fact sheet. [Online].Available: www.nln.org/ governmentaffairs/pdf/ NurseFacultyShortage.pdf.
2. Kaufman, K. (2007). Compensation for nurse educators: Findings from the NLN/Carnegie National Survey with Implications for recruitment and retention. [Headlines from the NLN]. Nursing Education Perspectives, 28(4), 233-235.
3. American Association of University Professors. (2007). facts and figures:AAUP faculty salary survey. [Online].Available: http:// chronicle.com/stats/aaup/.
JOYCE J. FITZPATRICK, EDITOR
Copyright National League for Nursing, Inc. Sep/Oct 2008
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