After years of working at patients’ bedsides, Sheila Blank and Chrissy Kauth both moved into higher education.
Blank is the director of the Centofanti School of Nursing at Youngstown State University, and Kauth is the associate dean in the College of Nursing at Kent State University.
“I think I found a love for teaching,” Kauth said. “And I was a preceptor at the bedside, and I really got to see those light-bulb moments with students, those aha moments where they finally were fitting the pieces of the puzzle together and understood why they were doing what they were doing.”
Hospital mergers and schedule changes led Blank to pursue a different way to use her nursing skills other than at a hospital. She started as the school nurse at the Rich Center for Autism.
“And then the nursing students would always come in, so I would be able to start teaching them as a clinical, and then I did clinicals part time,” she said.
She found that she enjoyed teaching students and, like Kauth, enjoyed witnessing students’ light-bulb moments.
“And that’s why a lot of faculty do it is because of those aha moments,” she said. “They know that they are really making a difference.”
But the number of nurses working in higher education is dwindling.
An American Association of Colleges of Nursing 2023-24 report found that U.S. nursing schools rejected 65,766 qualified applications from nursing programs in 2023 because of a lack of faculty, clinical sites, classroom space, clinical preceptors and budget constraints.
Most schools that responded to the survey pointed to faculty shortages as a main reason, according to a news release from the AACN.
Blank said it has become a running joke that whenever a faculty member who’s eligible to retire comes to talk to her, she first asks if they’re retiring. Filling a vacancy means finding someone with a combination and training who’s interested. She often asks people on staff if they know anyone who’s interested in the job. It’s challenging.
“It’s an aging population” and somewhat of a specialty, Blank said. “It does take a special person – they want to be dedicated to educating students.”
The workload between the two professions also differs. While working at a hospital, Blank worked 12-hour shifts. She had a certain number of patients and a list of tasks to complete. When she’d accomplished the tasks and the shift was over, she went home. Education is different.
“You are preparing that next generation to be where you used to be,” Blank said.
Rules of accreditation and other regulations are part of the day in education too. And you sometimes take the work home.
“And that, I think, is just nurses in general,” Blank said. “They want to help people.”
Pay also factors in. Kauth was in a management position 32 years ago when she left the hospital where she worked for a career in higher education. She took a 60% pay cut.
“Now mind you, it was nine months versus, obviously, year-round,” she said. “But I felt that I really wanted to see if this was something that I could make work.”
Higher education also didn’t demand night, weekend and holiday shifts, she added.
Blank said the shortage is affecting colleges and universities across the country.
“When I go to conferences, everybody has the same concerns,” she said. “It’s been an ongoing issue, because for one, like I said, it does take a special person to decide, OK, I want to walk away from the bedside and I want to educate students.”
Kauth said Kent doesn’t experience difficulty filling its nursing faculty roles, although specialty areas like obstetrics and pediatrics may be more challenging to find qualified faculty. KSU taps its pool of part-time faculty to fill full-time positions when someone retires or leaves the university.
“So I feel we’re very blessed because we have some that are very committed and really good at what they do,” Kauth said.
Kent’s nursing faculty, including regional campuses, staffs 45 full-time and 100 part-time faculty. About 1,500 students are enrolled.
Blank is in her third year as director of the Centofanti School of Nursing. She started working full time at YSU in 2014 and worked part time for seven years before that.
“I first started in clinicals, and that’s kind of the best of both worlds, because you’re still at the bedside, but yet you’re still teaching those students that really hands-on training,” she said. “And then I moved into the classroom.”
The nursing school includes 27 full-time faculty with more than 1,300 students enrolled. It offers associate degrees and bachelor’s, registered nurse to bachelor’s and master’s degree programs in nursing.
Kauth acknowledged that a change proposed by the U.S. Department of Education could affect the number of people who pursue advanced degrees in nursing. The department would change the classification and no longer consider nursing a professional degree. Other degrees also would be affected, including education, accounting, architecture and social work. The change would limit the amount of federal loans students pursuing those professions could borrow.
“I’ve already had students reach out that are current undergrads that wanted to go on for a graduate degree and are afraid they’re not going to be able to get any sort of a student loan because of this classification,” Kauth said. “I think that we will see some sort of an impact, but I’m hoping that we can mitigate some of that with either scholarships or some sort of subsidy so that these students can, in fact, get the education that they want and deserve.”
Pictured at top: Sheila Blank, director of the Centofanti School of Nursing at Youngstown State University.