BSN programs and liberal arts: IHE article

[sprout]

Matt Reed's take, which I think many here will agree with.

One of his points is that there is a shortage of faculty. The collective bargaining agreements at many Community Colleges require faculty pay to be equal across fields. That is obviously not reflecting the market reality. If you want to find and keep nursing professors, you have to pay what they would make in nursing or at a college with market-responsive salaries.

I suspect the CC faculty would not mind if their union negotiated the higher salary uniformly across the institution.

My state approved additional funding allocation specifically for bumping the salary of professors in specific fields.  (I forget the exact terminology, "high demand" or "high priority" or something like that.)  Definitely includes nursing, I think also a computing field or two and manufacturing. Union had fun working out a plan for implementing/justifying the increased pay.  I think at least part of it included shifting these faculty from a 9-month contract to a 10-month contract, with required summer work.

[writingprof]

I say the market will sort all this out.  If we have a nursing shortage, then hospitals will bid up the price of nursing labor.  Seeing that nursing is now a more lucrative field, more people will enter it.  If existing credentialing apparatuses (e.g., colleges) don't cooperate, alternative credentialing apparatuses will be found.

Or we'll just import a hella big nursing cohort from the third world, call them Home Healthcare Aids, and be done with it. 

[Aster]

Yeah, we've seen the market attempt to fix this before, in the mid-20th century. And it worked kind of, for like 10 years. And then we had a nursing shortage again in the 1970's, which never went away. We're now pushing past 40 years of a continuous nursing shortage in the U.S..

The sorts of things done in the mid-1960's to (temporarily) alleviate the problem are the same things that we've been futzing around with since the 1990's. Increased cohort sizes. Making it cheaper to be a nurse. Making it easier to be a nurse. Creating diet cola versions of nurses.

All that any of those solutions did was just increase inputs at the expense of quality. And when you do that, your new nurse gains suffer diminishing returns against higher numbers of nurses leaving the workforce because they don't like being a nurse. Hospitals don't give a crap; they can replace nurses nearly as fast as they lose 'em. There are never enough nurses, and yet hospitals continue to function decade after decade with with persistent nursing shortages. The lack of nurses is "fixed" within hospitals the same way that it always has been; just off-load the extra workload and duties onto your existing nursing staff. If they quit, fine, another eager young 20-something nurse will get hired next week. Professional nurses are in some ways like the fast food worker equivalents within the U.S. healthcare industry. Perpetually transient.

We've never really done anything meaningful to help with nursing burnout in the United States. On the contrary, for most modern nurses, the job is far $%^* than it was for nurses 30-40 years ago. Today, I know very few professional nurses who are still on the job after 10 years. The only professional nurse that comes to my mind who actually retired from the job as a senior citizen was my grandmother. She put about 40 years in.

Heck, my college can't even hold onto nursing *professors*. They're cycling in and out every 5-8-ish years. We lost another nursing professor just this week. 

[dismalist]

Yeah, we've seen the market attempt to fix this before, in the mid-20th century. And it worked kind of, for like 10 years. And then we had a nursing shortage again in the 1970's, which never went away. We're now pushing past 40 years of a continuous nursing shortage in the U.S..

The sorts of things done in the mid-1960's to (temporarily) alleviate the problem are the same things that we've been futzing around with since the 1990's. Increased cohort sizes. Making it cheaper to be a nurse. Making it easier to be a nurse. Creating diet cola versions of nurses.

All that any of those solutions did was just increase inputs at the expense of quality. And when you do that, your new nurse gains suffer diminishing returns against higher numbers of nurses leaving the workforce because they don't like being a nurse. Hospitals don't give a crap; they can replace nurses nearly as fast as they lose 'em. There are never enough nurses, and yet hospitals continue to function decade after decade with with persistent nursing shortages. The lack of nurses is "fixed" within hospitals the same way that it always has been; just off-load the extra workload and duties onto your existing nursing staff. If they quit, fine, another eager young 20-something nurse will get hired next week. Professional nurses are in some ways like the fast food worker equivalents within the U.S. healthcare industry. Perpetually transient.

We've never really done anything meaningful to help with nursing burnout in the United States. On the contrary, for most modern nurses, the job is far $%^* than it was for nurses 30-40 years ago. Today, I know very few professional nurses who are still on the job after 10 years. The only professional nurse that comes to my mind who actually retired from the job as a senior citizen was my grandmother. She put about 40 years in.

Heck, my college can't even hold onto nursing *professors*. They're cycling in and out every 5-8-ish years. We lost another nursing professor just this week.

Seems to me that wages are too low. :-)

[mamselle]

Part of that, which is true, has to do with the fact that--sorry, but--doctors sit on the boards of hospitals and routinely devalue nurses (who often do more thoughtful and thorough care) every chance they get, in every way they can. They talk a good game, speak well of them as 'colleagues,' but don't approve higher pay because it would undermine their own value of themselves (what was that term, 'cognitive dissonance'? Yeah, something like that).

There is also, still, a very strong male/female//husband/wife//'big guy'/'little woman' mindset among a number of MDs, especially those with longer tenure, who have traditionally been very conservative males. (I worked with a lot of excellent docs as well, but they stood out as exceptional).

The pay differential reflects this; the structured way nurses have to interact with MDs, deferentially "asking for consideration of xxx treatment given the potential for yyy outcome" indicates it; and having to skate very carefully around MD egos (whether male or female--both try to pull rank in getting RNs to do their job for them on the floor while expecting that same deference) gets tiresome--especially when some irate surgeon throws a chair across the room in the doctors' writing area because someone is sitting in his favorite rolling chair and they outrank him so they aren't going to get up and let him have it (true story--by observation).

The fact is that temp nurses can also come in at a higher cost (given the addition of agency fees) to cover shortages, stay as long as they like, leave when they like, and sometimes bleed the budget dry as a result, because staffing issues are so difficult and pay so low.

But that cost goes on a different line-item in the budget, and is less often questioned or reduced, since it's seen as 'emergency coverage."

Some of these issues have gotten better over the years, but not enough to make the job attractive to people who, for all the math and science required, can get a quieter, 9-5 lab bench job or work for a pharma doing intake and drug trial administration for twice the pay and more job satisfaction.

M.

[Durchlässigkeitsbeiwert]

Seems to me that wages are too low. :-)

By the same logic, competition for tenure track positions in some fields implies that wages are way too high for the large part of professoriat.

The problem with any pure market-based solution is that short-term price elasticity of the supply for the country as a whole is very low.
I.e. even ignoring capacity constraints, it would take multiple years for higher salary to start affecting supply. On top of that, high school graduates are hardly the best informed cohort in the world, when it comes to major selection. The latter is the reason, why likes of the original article are definitely not harmless.

[dismalist]

Seems to me that wages are too low. :-)

By the same logic, competition for tenure track positions in some fields implies that wages are way too high for the large part of professoriat.

Yes and no: Salaries that look "too high" allow selection according to quality.

If one wants more nurses of sufficient quality [and I don't think one wants' more professors of X of any quality], one has to pay more.

Life isn't free.

[Wahoo Redux]

I wonder if AJ is around?

Hey AJ, remember this?

It also irks me that there is so much negativity towards expressing an interest in leadership roles / administration.  In my opinion, such negativity is particularly frustrating because leadership-building opportunities seem to be provided to faculty based largely on the recommendations of senior colleagues.

I think the general negativity towards people who have an interest in leadership is because of the power-dynamic. 

Don't know if you've noticed, AJ, but academia is awash in negativity in all quarters, online and off.

You can put virtually any topic here on the fora and the negativity will soon accumulate.  Bring up virtually any subject in the hallways of your department and...well, maybe your department is a lot different from the ones I am familiar with, but I'm betting the topic will summon the powers of darkness.

It's the times.

Right, so we are to just sit back and accept it then.  If you didn't notice, Wahoo, these types of broad-stroked, dismissive arguments towards complaints is a systemic problem in academia.  Thank you for providing a good example of that.

My, my, my.

I have for a long time been trying to rally the troops.  I am one of the few cheerleaders for higher ed on these boards. 

You too, my friend, have just demonstrated what I mean when I say "the times."

Do you remember the conversation we had regarding "negativity"?

And I said:

I am simply pointing out that virtually any subject regarding the profession (except perhaps people who announce that they've gotten jobs) results in a "negative" response of some kind.  This whole thread is an example.  So if you bring up administration, it is going to get a number of responses that are negative.  Bring up adjuncts: very negative.  Tenure: negative.  Students: negative.  Etc.

We are all frustrated and demoralized.  The system is failing.

Well, here we are.

The world seems to have gone bat-shit crazy and we're all spinning around in it.

A history prof pens a mild-mannered editorial about alternatives to a BSN and he's called "a moron" and accused of being "harmful" and a host of comments about how badly one of the most sought after degrees in college is being administered. 

Now what do we do?

[marshwiggle]

Seems to me that wages are too low. :-)

By the same logic, competition for tenure track positions in some fields implies that wages are way too high for the large part of professoriat.

The problem with any pure market-based solution is that short-term price elasticity of the supply for the country as a whole is very low.
I.e. even ignoring capacity constraints, it would take multiple years for higher salary to start affecting supply. On top of that, high school graduates are hardly the best informed cohort in the world, when it comes to major selection. The latter is the reason, why likes of the original article are definitely not harmless.

In addition to this, there's also the question of how many young people are capable and interested? As has been pointed out here, many students can't handle the math, and the job demands of physical effort and unpleasant tasks means that lots of people who start a program drop out. This is a problem that gets overlooked in much of the diversity discussion; just because certain groups are underrepresented in a profession doesn't imply that the interest in that profession is uniform across various ethnic communities and so on. All the changes to hiring practices in the world won't fix the problem as long as the candidate pool is not uniformly "representative".

[polly_mer]

1) The math and science required for the BSN degree is pretty low as STEM college degrees go.  BSN holders are not prepared to get a good bench job compared to someone who has a real biology or chemistry degree. 

2) As liberal arts degrees used for immediate job possibilities go, I wouldn't recommend biology or chemistry if the goal is starting at a high salary.  Nurses in high demand geographic areas can start at $65-70k while the national average for chemistry and biology (if one can get a job in the glutted for decades fields) has been $35k for years. 

BSN graduates from Super Dinky were starting at more than tenured full STEM faculty at Super Dinky and were only a little less than assistant professors in the nursing program.  The tenured full nursing professors were making about twice as much as the STEM new hire assistant professors. 

However, the recent BSN graduates who wanted to move to the regional big cities were often angry to learn those weren't areas with nursing shortages and therefore the expensive places to live were much lower pay, sometimes below $40k.

3) It's not opinion when it's conclusions based on subject matter expertise.  Let's try another example.

Someone states that they are currently in Akron and would like to go to Milwaukee.  Someone gives the instructions of:

* Get on a plane to Denver.
* Rent a car and drive south on I-25 to Albuquerque.
* Take the left at Albuquerque and drive on I-40 until Oklahoma City.
* Return the car and fly to Minneapolis.

Minneapolis is a big city in the Midwest that's just as good as Milwaukee and better in many respects.  You're welcome.

That's crap advice on all measures.

It may be true that someone who wants to go to Milwaukee cannot go in the most direct method at the moment or should reevaluate their travel plans (e.g., visit Miami as a new place, visit the aunt in Indianapolis and Skype the cousin in Milwaukee, drive from Akron to Milwaukee while flights are grounded, or wait for the weather to get better to be able to fly).

However, giving a roundabout set of instructions to end up somewhere else entirely while asserting it's the same is just wrong.

I just keep flashing to 'that's not how this works.'

[writingprof]

Seems to me that wages are too low. :-)

By the same logic, competition for tenure track positions in some fields implies that wages are way too high for the large part of professoriat.

And that's obviously true.  Mind you, I'm grateful that the market hasn't been allowed to function properly in this case.

[apl68]

Yeah, we've seen the market attempt to fix this before, in the mid-20th century. And it worked kind of, for like 10 years. And then we had a nursing shortage again in the 1970's, which never went away. We're now pushing past 40 years of a continuous nursing shortage in the U.S..

The sorts of things done in the mid-1960's to (temporarily) alleviate the problem are the same things that we've been futzing around with since the 1990's. Increased cohort sizes. Making it cheaper to be a nurse. Making it easier to be a nurse. Creating diet cola versions of nurses.

All that any of those solutions did was just increase inputs at the expense of quality. And when you do that, your new nurse gains suffer diminishing returns against higher numbers of nurses leaving the workforce because they don't like being a nurse. Hospitals don't give a crap; they can replace nurses nearly as fast as they lose 'em. There are never enough nurses, and yet hospitals continue to function decade after decade with with persistent nursing shortages. The lack of nurses is "fixed" within hospitals the same way that it always has been; just off-load the extra workload and duties onto your existing nursing staff. If they quit, fine, another eager young 20-something nurse will get hired next week. Professional nurses are in some ways like the fast food worker equivalents within the U.S. healthcare industry. Perpetually transient.

We've never really done anything meaningful to help with nursing burnout in the United States. On the contrary, for most modern nurses, the job is far $%^* than it was for nurses 30-40 years ago. Today, I know very few professional nurses who are still on the job after 10 years. The only professional nurse that comes to my mind who actually retired from the job as a senior citizen was my grandmother. She put about 40 years in.

Heck, my college can't even hold onto nursing *professors*. They're cycling in and out every 5-8-ish years. We lost another nursing professor just this week.

A lot of this sounds like the contemporary situation with K-12 teachers as well.

[mahagonny]

Seems to me that wages are too low. :-)

By the same logic, competition for tenure track positions in some fields implies that wages are way too high for the large part of professoriat.

Yes and no: Salaries that look "too high" allow selection according to quality.

Allow or consistently result in?

[polly_mer]

Matt Reed has another entry: Why do so many people want to be nurses.

[marshwiggle]

Matt Reed has another entry: Why do so many people want to be nurses.

From that article:

I don't blame students for wanting degrees that lead to good jobs.  That makes sense.  I blame the rest of us for allowing an economy to make the paths to stability so narrow that the few identifiable pathways to stability get overcrowded.  Ultimately, the answer to the excess demand for nursing seats isn't a 'fairer' way to allocate them; it's a fairer economy in which pathways to stability are plentiful.

I haven't the slightest idea what a "pathway to stability" is. Nursing is valuable economically because its value is inescapable as long as there are people needing medical care. The jobs that will be required in a stable economy are those that meet a fundamental need; not ones dreamed up by some committee of academics.