11: REPORT ON A NATIONAL STUDY OF DOCTORAL NURSING FACULTY ■ 259DNP- prepared faculty were more likely to leave their position due to salary and work-
load issues which included balancing faculty teaching demands with clinical practice
and certification requirements. Since nursing is a practice discipline, this finding is par-
ticularly troublesome for advanced practice nurses. Nursing academic leaders need to
create formal academic clinical partnerships and practice arrangements in an effort to
increase salaries, incorporate clinical practice into faculty workload, and inform clini-
cal teaching. In other words, formal faculty practice arrangements need to become the
norm beyond academic health centers. If we do not seriously address faculty practice
in academic nursing, we are at risk of marginalizing our practitioner teaching faculty.
They are also at risk of work– life imbalance, stress, and/ or burnout from juggling prac-
tice hours/ requirements, and their teaching and academic expectations (Shirey, 2006;
Smeltzer et al., 2015).
In 2007, the National League for Nursing/ Carnegie Foundation National Survey
of Nurse Educators: Compensation, Workload, and Teaching Practices study focused
specifically on the workload of full- time nursing faculty in nonadministrative positions
teaching in either undergraduate or graduate nursing programs. Many of the faculty
respondents indicated that they had administrative duties as well as teaching respon-
sibilities, resulting in a 56- hour average workweek. Furthermore, in addition to their
work of full- time faculty obligations, more than 62% of these nursing faculty engaged
in clinical practice work outside their full- time faculty role, averaging an additional
day each week (7– 10 hours). Given the current nurse faculty shortage, the question of
how workload impacts job satisfaction, recruitment, and attrition remains highly rele-
vant. In this context, it was notable that overall 45% of nursing faculty stated that they
were dissatisfied with their current workload (Kaufman, 2007a, 2007b, 2007c). Although
this particular survey is not annually conducted, these findings are still relevant today
and consistent with Smeltzer et al. (2015) concerning poor work– life balance for faculty
who practice outside their faculty role. With the rise in DNP- prepared faculty, this issue
of faculty clinical practice as an integral part of faculty workload requires immediate
examination and solutions.
According to AACN Report on 2014 to 2015 enrollment and graduations in bac-
calaureate and graduate programs in nursing, U.S. nursing schools turned away 68,938
qualified applicants from baccalaureate and graduate nursing programs in 2014 due to
an insufficient number of faculty, clinical sites, classroom space, clinical preceptors, and
budget constraints. Almost two thirds of the nursing schools responding to the survey
pointed to faculty shortages as a reason for not accepting all qualified applicants into
baccalaureate programs.
Two of the coauthors of this chapter are deans and they can both attest that in
formal school of nursing searches for full- time faculty positions, there is a dearth of
PhD- prepared applicants. The majority applicant pool consists of master’s- prepared
clinicians (many who have taught clinical nursing on an adjunct basis) or DNP-
prepared applicants who rarely have full- time teaching experience. In both these
cases, applicants are often surprised by the range of salary offers, but these appoint-
ments are subject to differential for the doctoral degree and full- time teaching expe-
rience. The point here is that salary issues in this nursing faculty shortage may be
compounded by the constitution of the applicant pool. These findings are explored
further and compared to the findings from both the 2012 and 2016 National Study
of Doctoral Nursing Faculty, which are detailed in following sections. It should be
noted that the AACN does produce an annual enrollment and graduation report
(PhD/ DNP data mentioned earlier was extracted from this report), but our review
of these most recent reports has found that there are only limited data related to the
doctoral faculty role.