256 ■ III: ROLE FUNCTIONS OF DOCTORAL ADVANCED NURSING PRACTICE
- With a national and global recession and intense competition for resources,
will the need for additional start- up resources for DNP programs cause PhD
programs to lose resources? - With such tumultuous changes in doctoral nursing education, what is the cur-
rent state of the quality of life of doctoral nursing faculty?
We contend that the “burning questions” of the day facing the doctoral nursing
education professoriate are as follows:
- Are doctoral nursing faculty satisfied with their current role?
- Are doctoral nursing faculty concerned that DNP Program enrollment has
surpassed PhD program enrollment? - Are doctoral nursing faculty concerned about the DNP’s effect on nursing
knowledge development? - Are current academic administrators actively engaged in succession planning?
- Are doctoral nursing faculty concerned about nursing faculty salaries?
- If the DNP graduate is not educated specifically for an academic role, are doc-
toral nursing faculty concerned about who will teach nursing students in the
future?
In this 2016 study, the questions have changed. Now, with this second, replicative
study, we pose a new set of questions a posteriori, as we move into the near future. This
chapter focuses on a comparison of the two studies, and changes over this period in the
doctoral faculty landscape, rather than an emphasis on cross- sectional reporting of the
2016 findings.
■ BACKGROUND
This follow- up study was conducted to ascertain nursing faculty’s perceptions and satis-
faction with doctoral nursing education since the first national study of doctoral nursing
faculty published in 2012 (Dreher et al., 2012). The impetus for this study was the change
in demographics of doctoral nursing faculty in addition to a surge in DNP programs
from 10 in 2005 to 269 programs in 2014 (American Association of Colleges of Nursing
[AACN], 2015a). The landscape has changed dramatically since two of the coauthors led
the first national conference on the DNP degree in Annapolis, Maryland, in 2007 and in
Hilton Head Island, South Carolina, in 2009 sponsored by Drexel University Division of
Continuing Nursing Education. These two conferences included papers from a diverse
set of doctoral nursing faculty who expressed concerns over:
- Who will teach DNP students if the DNP degree does not prepare graduates
for their role as expert educators in graduate nursing programs (largely in ad-
vanced practice nursing programs)? - With the demand for advanced practice nurse educators to maintain clinical
competency to retain national certification, will future graduate APRN faculty
(for both MSN and DNP programs) be marginalized and largely excluded
from tenure- track positions with their inability to also engage in seeking and
securing funded research? - With the current issues in higher education and the intense competition for
resources, will the need for additional start- up resources for DNP programs
cause PhD programs to lose resources? - With such extreme changes in doctoral nursing education, what is the current
state of the quality of life of doctoral nursing faculty?