Florida’s top nursing schools turn away students amid ongoing nurse shortage

With a recent influx of state money, Central Florida colleges with high-performing nursing programs hired more faculty, built new facilities and expanded their programs to accept additional qualified applicants.

Yet it’s still not enough to end a nursing shortage that is predicted to leave Florida with 21,000 unfilled jobs this year and more in the future.

A 2021 report from the Florida Hospital Association and the Safety Net Hospital Alliance of Florida projected that Florida would face a 59,000-nurse shortage by 2035 amid an aging and growing population.

Florida, the report said, needs to increase sharply the number of nursing school graduates.

Currently, high-quality Florida nursing programs — among them the University of Central Florida’s College of Nursing — turn away qualified applicants because of a lack of capacity. The state also has the lowest first-time pass rate on the national nursing licensing exam, called NCLEX, fueled by poor-performing schools.

In the 2022-23 school year, the average Florida nursing program had about 217 qualified applicants but could only accommodate 148 according to a report by the Florida Center for Nursing, a state center headquartered at the University of South Florida College of Nursing.

The center found 76% of Florida students passed the NCLEX-RN exam on their first try in 2023, compared to about 88% nationwide.

Nursing education leaders say the key to solving this issue is to further increase funding and enrollment at high-quality, accredited schools, where passing rates often exceed the national average, and come down harder on for-profit and non-accredited schools, which are more likely to produce graduates unprepared to join the workforce. Last quarter, at some of those schools, not a single graduate passed the nursing exam on their first attempt.

Florida has invested hundreds of millions of dollars over the past two years to expand state school nursing programs.

The College of Central Florida, UCF, Seminole State College of Florida, Polk State College and Lake-Sumter College all had 100% first-time pass rates in the most recent quarter, according to the State Board of Nursing. Valencia College’s graduates had an 89% pass rate.

The 2021 report, and its warning of a shortage of nearly 60,000 nurses, pushed schools to increase their class sizes, said Mary Lou Sole, dean of UCF’s College of Nursing.

“It was a call to action,” Sole said.

UCF has increased enrollment in its nursing school by about 100 students and will take about 150 more once it moves to the newly constructed Dr. Phillips Nursing Pavilion in Lake Nona in 2025, funded in part by $43 million from the state. The nursing school has also added about 40 faculty and staff using state funding over the last two years, Sole added.

But like several other state schools, it turned away qualified applicants during the most recent admissions cycle. Still an admission rate of 84% of qualified applicants for this fall was “the highest we’ve ever had,” Sole noted.

At Lake-Sumter, a push to “aggressively” increase enrollment means the school has not rejected qualified applicants recently, said Christine Ramos, the college’s associate vice president of health professions.

“In the last several years, we’ve been committed to really trying to recover from the COVID era and increase our seating capacity,” she added.

Lake-Sumter in June received $400,000 from the Florida Department of Education through the Linking Industry to Nursing Education Grant program, matched by $400,000 in donations from local hospital partners. The funding will go towards equipment and support the school’s RN to BSN program, which aims to increase the number of BSN graduates in local hospitals by helping nurses with associate’s degrees get their bachelor’s while working.

Central Florida’s private nursing schools are growing as well. AdventHealth University, a private, non-profit school with above average NCLEX passing rates, is expanding its Orlando campus and adding a nursing school in Tampa. It aims to double its student enrollment by 2026.

Nursing students like Emily Thompson, a senior at AdventHealth University, are grateful to enter such a program.

Thompson spent the first part of her life in the neonatal intensive care unit, cared for by nurses. For almost as long as she can remember, she’s wanted to pay that forward.

“I just remember from a young age that I wanted to be that person for someone else,” Thompson said. “I wanted to be the person that made someone’s experience just a little better and brighter while they’re in the hospital.”

Thompson will graduate with her bachelor of science in nursing in December. Once she passes the licensing exam, she plans to work as a nurse at AdventHealth Orlando, the flagship hospital of the national hospital system, which currently lists more than 60 open nursing jobs in Orlando on its website.

One of the factors limiting growth at state nursing schools is a lack of faculty, said Nancy Gasper, dean of nursing at Seminole State College of Florida.

Nurses working in hospitals or medical practices make more money, on average, than those who turn to teaching.

“It’s hard for nurses to leave the bedside and take a hit to their compensation to become educators. So I think there needs to also be a relook at those scales to see if there’s a way to level the compensation playing field,” Gasper said.

Seminole’s associate in science degree in nursing program typically turns away from 60 to 100 qualified applicants per semester, she added.

Central Florida’s growing population makes it hard for nursing schools to keep up with demand.

“We are going to continue to all work really hard to address the need, but the numbers of hospitals and hospital systems keeps growing,” Sole said.

Ccatherman@orlandosentinel.com