CCSN falls behind on nursing professors

Monday, July 25, 2005 | 11:05 a.m.

Community College of Southern Nevada officials are scrambling to recruit enough nursing professors before fall semester begins next month, but for each new hire there seems to be a resignation, President Richard Carpenter said.

The problem?

The college just can't pay the professors enough to recruit them and keep them for long, Carpenter and Health Sciences Dean Fran Brown said.

It's hard enough to find enough nurses with the required master's degree to teach, Brown said, but then the college must fight with the private sector and other Southern Nevada institutions for those nurses.

"Right now we are getting pummeled. We just can't compete," Carpenter said.

A CCSN nursing professor with a master's degree makes about $45,000 a year for a 10-month contract, Brown said, whereas UNLV pays about $60,000.

The median salary for a registered nurse in the industry is $59,700, according to a 2005 report from the state Employment, Training & Rehabilitation Department. A nurse in public administration, where many with master's degrees go, makes about $64,800 a year on average.

After hiring eight new professors in January 2005 and eight more over the summer, the community college is still short three full-time professors and one nursing director for the fall, said Brown, who is pulling double duty as dean and interim director for the nursing program.

The open professor spots are all in supervising advanced students in their clinical rotations, Brown said. That restricts professors to eight students at a time.

Brown said she is trying to hire part-time faculty to fill the gap, but she said current faculty will likely have to take on extra courses.

Students should not be affected, Brown said.

CCSN is not the only institution facing nursing faculty shortages for the fall. UNLV and Nevada State College in Henderson have staff woes of their own, officials said.

CCSN's shortage is only more pronounced because the college serves more students than UNLV and Nevada State combined, and officials are more restricted in what they can pay professors, Carpenter said.

UNLV has four full-time spots open -- two of which the School of Nursing has made offers for, Dean Carolyn Yucha said. She is also looking for part-time instructors for some clinical rotations.

Nevada State has its full-time positions covered, but officials there are looking for part-time faculty for up to five clinical rotations.

"It may not sound like much, but it's a lot if you don't have them," Sherri Coffman, an associate professor of nursing at Nevada State, said.

"It's always a hassle trying to make sure we have enough faculty."

The shortage, Yucha fears, has led to a decline in the quality of nursing faculty being hired across the state and people with less experience overseeing nursing clinical work. She's said she's lucky to get one applicant for any one open position.

"The stage has been set for some really serious errors being made," Yucha said.

"The schools are under pressure to take more students, and we are not as selective in many faculty as we ought to be. And I suspect CCSN is becoming less and less selective."

Lisa Black, executive director for the Nevada Nurses Association, had similar fears but agreed that it was tough for the state institutions to keep nurses at the current salaries.

If CCSN professors have to take on extra rotations, that means they'll have less time to help students who are struggling or to help students "grow as nurses," Black said in an e-mail response to the Sun.

"In the end game ... it is the students who feel the strain of the faculty shortage, and that is the really unfortunate outcome," Black said.

The nursing faculty shortage also severely limits how many new nurses can be trained, officials at all three state institutions said.

CCSN, for instance, is just 26 students shy of its goal of doubling its nursing capacity to 500 students. But the college had to turn away more than 100 qualified students for this fall semester because it was already struggling to recruit enough faculty, Brown said.

CCSN received 390 applications for this fall for its associate degree program, 215 of whom were highly qualified students, but only 104 were admitted.

The state institutions compete against schools across the country and private institutions in state, such as the University of Southern California and Touro University, said Yucha, who estimates that 25 percent of her time is spent trying to recruit faculty.

"Every school has a shortage, so when we make an offer to a faculty members, they have three other offers to look at," Yucha said. "So we get into price wars to get them."

That's a price war CCSN cannot afford to enter because its salaries are mandated by a state-wide schedule for community colleges, Carpenter said. The universities and the state college are able to pay a range and do some negotiating on its salaries. CCSN has thus lost two nursing professors in the last year to UNLV because of that, he said.

The community college has also lost two professors to local private institutions, Brown said. Money is often the deciding factor when a professor declines a job offer or leaves, but some professors also have retired. One recent loss was because the professor being called to active military service.

Money is still an issue for UNLV, Yucha said, but it comes into play more when trying to recruit doctoral candidates. Other universities are offering endowed positions with higher salaries and more research perks, and UNLV will have to come up with some major private financing to be able to compete, Yucha said.

UNLV's first nursing doctoral students won't graduate for at least three years, and most of them are working fulltime so it will likely be five or six, Yucha said. The university does not have the scholarship money to allow those students to quit their jobs and go to school full time.

Carpenter, meanwhile, said he is looking at whether CCSN can use some of the money the 2005 Legislature gave the college to equalize salaries to raise the pay for the nursing faculty.

The Legislature gave the college $1.8 million over this biennium to raise professor salaries after finding that CCSN professors made about $3,000 less than other community college professors in the state. The disparity, however, is because CCSN has more entry-level professors than the other community colleges, Carpenter said. All of the institutions are on the same salary schedule.

Carpenter said he is putting together a proposal now on how to disperse the equity pool to bring to the Board of Regents in September.