Nursing Schools Are Rejecting Thousands of Applicants — In the Middle of a Nursing Shortage

American nursing academies are rejecting thousands of qualified applicants despite a major nursing shortage caused by mass retirements and the burgeoning senior population, reports CNN . "There's tremendous demand from hospitals and clinics to hire more nurses," notes Robert Rosseter with the American Association of Colleges of Nursing. "There's tremendous demand from students who want to enter nursing programs, but schools are tapped out." The American Nurses Association estimates that the United States currently has about 3 million nurses, and it will need to produce more than 1 million new registered nurses by 2022 to meet its healthcare needs. The American Association of Colleges of Nursing calculates that nursing schools rejected more than 56,000 qualified applicants from undergraduate programs last year, while in the past decade they have annually turned away about 30,000 qualified applicants. Due to a lack of openings, nursing programs across the entire spectrum are rejecting students en masse. Nursing schools struggle to enlarge class size, partly because hiring more qualified educators is difficult. "The annual national faculty vacancy rate in nursing programs is over 7 percent," Rosseter says. "That's pretty high. It's about two teachers per nursing school or a shortage of 1,565 teachers." Meanwhile, better wages for working nurses are diverting current and potential nurse teachers from education.