1: THE HISTORICAL AND POLITICAL PATH OF DOCTORAL NURSING EDUCATION ■ 17
In reflecting back, it is interesting to note that at the 2010 National Organization
of Nurse Practitioner Faculties (NONPF) meeting, the sense was that both degrees
would continue and be supported at least for the time being ( Academic Nurse , 2010).
That characterization does not appear to be prescient, but it is concerning that with
these continual trends of support for both master’s and DNP preparation for the entry-
level NP (in particular), the focus on master’s APRN practice at the AACN master’s
education annual conference has been largely absent for many years. This disconnect
is recognized by the RAND Corporation, but attention to quality master’s advanced
practice nursing (APN) programs needs to continue with a higher level of visibility
and support, despite the politics of the profession. My previous employer has robust
enrollments in all their online master’s NP programs and it is unlikely they are plan-
ning any conversion to DNP only entry level for NPs. At my current institution, enroll-
ment in our master’s Family Nurse Practitioner (FNP) program is at capacity and we
are challenged like many institutions to secure a steady supply of master’s- prepared
FNP preceptors. We hypothesize that perhaps prospective NP applicants were anx-
ious to enroll in master’s NP programs ahead of the “feared 2015 mandate for DNP
entry” (which was never a mandate and which would have grandfathered everyone
imaginable), and that perhaps our enrollments will flatten out. Further, the greater
Philadelphia region is saturated with nursing schools, and yet in fall 2010, only one
nursing program was offering a BSN- to- DNP program for NPs. In 2016, that number
has grown to three and only one school has phased out the master’s for the DNP. In a
2009 article in The American Nurse , then Dean and Professor Linda Cronenwett of the
School of Nursing at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill was quoted stat-
ing, “I support the DNP Essentials outlined by the AACN and the important emphasis
on quality and safety competencies, but I think society would be better served by a
postmaster’s DNP” (Trossman, 2009, p. 8). This issue will obviously continue to be
debated over the next decade at least.
So the question remains: Does the profession really need nurses with doctor-
ates? The answer is unequivocally “yes.” In our history, the burden of a burgeoning
discipline has always necessitated that nurses possess doctorates to achieve parity
with other faculty in other disciplines in colleges and universities (the academy).
Superimposed on this need for nurses with doctorates with research skills was the
realization that if the scientific basis of nursing was going to grow, the profession
would need them in larger numbers, and thus we saw mostly new PhD and DNSc
programs opening in the 1970s. Certainly, this supply would have to grow in order
for more rigorous nursing science to be conducted and for our science to be per-
ceived more as a “real science” by others. We should mention that as the science of
nursing slowly evolved, there was initially a focus on nursing administration and
nursing education research and an absence of focus on clinical research. Indeed, with
the founding of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Nursing in 1935, with its
mission to promote nursing education in the collegiate/ university environment and
away from the hospital- based programs, one of the aims of the new organization was
“to promote study and experimentation in nursing service and nursing education”
(Goodrich, 1936, p. 767). This may very well have been one of the earliest visible policy
statements to encourage nursing research. Yet, over time, although nursing admin-
istration research has been aligned with health services research, the predominance
of clinical research over all other types (with the devaluation of nursing education
research), the debate has largely waned, and clinical research, favoring quantitative
methods, now predominates as it has more and more extensive funding sources
(Hutchinson, 2001; Werley & Westlake, 1985).