Welcome to Monday, April 10. Today’s Briefing was written by Rick Seltzer, with contributions from Julia Piper. Write to me: rick.seltzer@chronicle.com.
Colleges need to care about burnout in nursing.
An overwhelming majority of nurses — 84 percent — are emotionally exhausted, according to new research polling those licensed in Michigan. A whopping 39 percent of practicing nurses said they planned to leave their positions in the next year, and 28 percent said they wanted to cut their clinical hours.
This grim assessment clearly matters for the health-care sector. But it’s also a flashing red light for colleges.
Such high turnover demands a wide educational pipeline to train new nurses, especially given already-projected shortages. On that point, colleges are scrambling to rise to the challenge. When college leaders talk about expanding programs to meet work-force demands, they often talk about nursing. This focus seems good for the college and good for the student at a time of growing public concern about whether postsecondary education pays off.
Less discussed is whether these new graduates will enter jobs in fields they’ll want to stay in.
The new research on nurse burnout reminded me of something Kristen Torres, president of allied health at Arizona College, said during a recent virtual roundtable on career preparation and work-force development, which was organized by the University of Phoenix.
“If we’re graduating out students who could, quite frankly, make more money working at McDonald’s, there’s a problem,” Torres said. “We need entry-level health-care workers.”
This point underscores concerns about economics and equity. Nursing programs are slowly diversifying from their traditional skew toward white students. Do we risk tracking underrepresented students into low-paying jobs that are getting harder and harder to do? Who gets to earn advanced degrees to move up the career ladder after a few years?
Students’ career satisfaction is not just an issue for institutions with nursing programs. A broad array of colleges hype up work-force-oriented offerings like credentials, microcredentials, and badges, in addition to degree programs.
One recent count found almost 1.1 million unique credentials in the U.S., from certificates offered by nontraditional providers to bachelor’s degrees at universities. There is “no common currency or nomenclature” to apply to many of these credentials, said Gregory Fowler, president of the University of Maryland Global Campus, during last month’s virtual roundtable.
Can so many credentials really signal value in the job market without confusing employers and students? Will they steer students into fields that don’t burn them out, or that pay more than McDonald’s?
These challenges are embedded deep in the economy and the education system. It’s not fair to ask colleges to solve them on their own. But it would be foolish for higher ed not to think about them.