Nursing: Hot Job, High Pay -- So Where Are the Takers?

Nurses confer at the surge triage area during the TOPOFF3 at Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital in New Brunswick, N.J. Recruiters and employers have used incentives ranging from gas cards to $20,000-signing bonuses to attract nursing candidates.

(Getty Images)

Older Patients, Older Nurses

There are about 2.5 million registered nurses in the United States, about 700,000 more than there were in 2000, according to government data. But the rising number of trained nurses isn't keeping up with demand: As the general population ages -- a trend driven largely by the aging wave of baby boomers -- more nurses are needed to serve the needs of this population in one way or another.

"Some parts of the country are so challenged for nurses that they are recruiting nurses internationally from places like India and China," said Mary Walker, the dean of the Marcella Niehoff School of Nursing at Loyola University in Chicago.

The nursing population, as a whole, is aging. Recent statistics, Walker said, show that the average age of a registered professional nurse is 47.3 years old, and just 10 percent of nurses in the United States are under the age of 30.

Kathleen Dracup, the dean of the School of Nursing at the University of California at San Francisco, said the average age of nurses has been rising since the 1980s.

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Nursing is a historically female profession, but the number of women opting to enter the field, she said, began dropping as they found a growing array of other career opportunities.

Still, according to some people in the profession, the shortage of nurses isn't for a lack of people who want to go into the field.

In recent years, Dracup said, media attention to the plight of the nursing profession, as well as an increased emphasis on values in the post 9/11 era, has helped raise interest in nursing.

The problem, experts say, is that there aren't enough open slots in nurse training programs to accommodate those interested in the profession.

In 2007, nursing schools turned away more than 40,000 qualified applicants, according to the American Association of Colleges of Nursing.

A lack of nursing faculty plays a major role in limiting the size of nurse training programs, Dracup said.

Salaries for nursing faculty, she said, haven't kept pace with salaries for nurses in general, and that's discouraged nurses from pursuing teaching careers. She said nurses with master's degrees earn, on average, $8,000 more in clinical practice -- $82,500 -- than they would if they were nursing school faculty members.