With the United States facing an estimated deficit of more than 250,000 registered nurses by 2028, the nursing shortage is seemingly hard to escape right now: It is dominating headlines, part of policy debates and seen in the lived experiences of anyone who has waited for hours in an understaffed emergency room. But for all the attention this crisis receives, we’re not talking enough about what’s driving it. Beyond the bedside nursing shortage, there is a growing deficit of advanced practice providers, clinical educators, and nurse leaders who oversee care delivery and manage healthcare teams. These are the professionals who train the next generation of nurses — and without them, we risk slowing down the talent pipeline significantly.

The numbers are stark. According to the American Association of Colleges of Nursing, more than 65,000 qualified applicants were turned away from nursing programs in the most recent academic year, largely because schools lack the faculty to teach them. The national nursing faculty vacancy rate currently hovers near 7%, with nearly 1,700 positions unfilled. More than a third of current nursing faculty are over age 60, and a wave of retirements is accelerating the shortage. Meanwhile, faculty salaries trail clinical roles by 20% to 30%, making it difficult to attract doctoral-prepared nurses to academia when they can earn significantly more in practice.

This creates a vicious cycle: Too few educators mean too few seats in nursing programs, which result in too few graduates entering the workforce. At this rate, the bedside shortage will only keep growing. Breaking that cycle requires making graduate nursing education more accessible — not only for the students who need advanced degrees, but also for the faculty we need to keep teaching. Online graduate programs offer one of the most effective paths to doing both.

Yet these programs can face resistance. Critics question whether virtual formats can adequately prepare clinicians for the realities of patient care. Too often, online programs are treated as a pandemic-era stopgap, rather than a legitimate long-term model. That skepticism comes at a real cost. For licensed nurses looking to advance their careers — by pursuing a Master’s, a Doctor of Nursing Practice, or a specialized certification — traditional in-person graduate programs remain a significant barrier. Many are working full time, raising families, or living in rural areas far from academic medical centers. The same constraints also apply to many faculty members. By reducing the burden of regular travel and rigid scheduling, we can attract and retain experienced educators and make the profession more attractive and accessible to the next generation.

Online graduate programs remove those barriers without compromising rigor. The most impactful models do so not by abandoning hands-on learning, but rather by incorporating it strategically. A hybrid approach is most effective because it combines high-quality online coursework with intentional on-campus immersion experiences, like direct faculty mentorship and simulation training. This allows students to gain the flexibility they need without sacrificing the experiential learning required to be prepared for a clinical environment.

Like many areas of higher education, online nursing instruction became more prevalent in reaction to the COVID-19 pandemic. But for some institutions, virtual education is far from new. At The University of Texas Medical Branch, our School of Nursing has spent more than a decade developing and refining virtual instruction for graduate nursing students. Over a decade ago, we implemented a quality improvement program using videoconferencing via FaceTime to conduct virtual clinical site visits.

Across 492 visits over three semesters, faculty, students and preceptors all found the virtual format to be an effective way to evaluate student progress, with more than 85% of stakeholders reporting satisfaction and an estimated savings of nearly $142,000 (compared to in-person clinical site visits). We also consistently see high certification exam pass rates. The approach has worked so well that additional graduate tracks adopted it independently. When the pandemic hit and institutions scrambled to move online, UTMB had years of established protocols to draw from — and as a result, other programs in Texas, as well as nationally and internationally, even reached out to us for guidance.

Online graduate nursing programs are not a workaround. They are a proven workforce development engine — one that expands access for students, eases the burden on faculty and introduces future practitioners to telehealth workflows before they ever enter practice. Solving the nursing crisis requires more than recruiting new graduates; it requires investing in the nurses we already have and giving them accessible paths to advanced degrees, leadership roles and teaching careers. Institutions need to commit to building and funding online graduate programs, and accrediting bodies need to evaluate them on outcomes rather than format. Online graduate programs have been building toward this moment for years. Now it’s time to fund them, scale them and treat them as what they are: one of the most effective tools we have to solve the nursing crisis.

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