Hospitals across California are short about 40,000 full-time nurses, but many state-run universities only accept 1% of nurse applicants, the San Francisco Chronicle reported March 22.
Nursing is notoriously difficult to get into at 17 of the 20 California state university campuses. At University of California, Los Angeles and University of California, Irving, only 118 nursing students were admitted out of 11,776 applicants in 2023. This is far below the national average acceptance rate of nursing school programs: around 66%, BeMo reported.
The reason for low admissions comes down to costs and clinical placement limitations, said the Chronicle.
At UC Irvine, the school spends less than $10,000 a year educating engineering students, but the nursing school spends at least twice that amount, according to the Chronicle. Nursing also requires smaller classes, often with 10 students to one instructor rather than a packed lecture hall. The equipment for nursing also adds up to a couple hundred thousand dollars. Despite costs, universities are trying to expand their seats, but find hiring enough qualified instructors difficult. According to the Chronicle, universities are also struggling to find enough clinical placements.
The Chronicle reports that California has more than 140 nursing programs across community colleges and universities, but many hospitals tend to host no more than eight students at a time in once-a-week clinical pairings.
To help relieve the bottleneck, some universities are looking for more money to invest in traditional nursing education and research-intensive schooling that would encourage students to become researchers and hospital leaders.
