How to Become a Nursing Professor

What Does a Nursing Professor Actually Do All Day?

Three things, and only one of them is standing in front of a class. You teach, you do scholarship, and you do service. Teaching means lecture courses, skills lab, and clinical supervision, where you take a group of students onto a hospital unit and stay responsible for every patient they touch. Scholarship means grant applications, data collection, manuscripts, and the reviewers who reject them. Service means committees, accreditation self-studies, admissions files, and search committees.

The mix changes completely between jobs. A clinical instructor at a community college spends most of the week on the unit with students and grading care plans. A tenure track assistant professor at a research university spends most of the week writing grants and running a study, and teaches one or two courses a term specifically to protect that time. Same job title family, different lives.

The part that surprises new faculty is how much of the job is other people's paperwork. You'll sit on dissertation committees, review colleagues for promotion, write your own annual activity report, and answer to an accreditor on a cycle. A nursing professor job is partly an administrative job with teaching and research attached.

How Do You Become a Nursing Professor?

The sequence below is how almost everyone gets there. The order matters more than the speed, because two of these steps are much harder to do late than early.

1. 1

   Get licensed and go work as a nurse

   Nursing schools hire people who have practised. Your clinical years are what let you run a skills lab and supervise students on a unit, and a hiring committee reads them as credibility before it reads anything else. You can start the doctorate while you're still working, and most people do.

2. 2

   Pick the doctorate that matches the track you want

   A nursing PhD trains you to generate evidence and is the credential research universities want on the tenure track. A DNP trains you to apply it and gets you hired into plenty of teaching lines. Read the PhD and DNP comparison before you apply, because switching later costs years.

3. 3

   Get in, and get funded

   Of the programs we track, 19 cover tuition and pay a stipend, 103 admit you straight from a BSN, and 68 have dropped the GRE. Funding is the single biggest determinant of whether you finish, so treat it as an admissions criterion of your own. The admissions guide covers what committees actually read.

4. 4

   Teach while you're still a student

   This is the step people skip and regret. Take the teaching assistantship, guest lecture, pick up a clinical instructor contract. Search committees for teaching jobs want evidence you can teach, and a dissertation is not that evidence.

5. 5

   Publish out of your dissertation before you defend

   A tenure track search committee counts papers. Getting two or three manuscripts out of the dissertation while you're still in the program is the difference between starting the tenure clock ahead and starting it behind.

6. 6

   Read the job ad for the word tenure

   Postings for a nursing professor job say clinical track, tenure track, or non-tenure track, and that phrase decides your salary, your teaching load, your security, and whether you'll spend nights writing grants. Decide which one you want before you apply, not after you're offered.

What Are the Academic Ranks for Nursing Faculty?

Nursing schools use the same rank ladder as the rest of the university, with a parallel clinical ladder running alongside it. The titles look similar. What sits underneath them is not.

There is one more rung past full professor, and it is where the money is. Postsecondary education administrators, the deans and associate deans, earn a median of $104,590, and the 90th percentile reaches $215,620. A meaningful share of nursing PhD holders end up there, and the pay problem lower down the ladder is part of why.

Should You Take a Tenure Track or a Clinical Track Job?

This is the decision that shapes your life, and plenty of nurses accept a faculty offer without understanding which one they signed. A tenure track appointment is probationary. The clock runs about six years, and at the end of it you submit a dossier of publications, grants, teaching evaluations, and service, and a committee decides whether you stay permanently or leave the university. Up or out. There is no third outcome at most schools.

In exchange, the tenure track gives you protected time. Your teaching load is lighter because the school expects you to spend the hours on research instead, and at a research university part of your salary may come from the grants you win. You get to chair dissertations, build a lab, and set your own research agenda. If the tenure review goes your way, you have a job nobody can take from you.

A clinical track appointment has no clock and no tenure. You're on a contract that gets renewed, you teach far more, and you're valued for the practice expertise the tenure track people often don't have. There's a promotion ladder, clinical assistant to clinical associate to clinical professor, and it comes with raises. What it doesn't come with is permanence or a research budget.

Pick based on what you actually want to do on a Tuesday. If writing grants sounds like the worst part of the job, the tenure track will make you miserable for six years and then decline you. If teaching sixty students a term sounds like the worst part, the clinical track will do the same. Neither track is the safe one.

What Does a Nursing Professor's Teaching Load Look Like?

A teaching load in nursing is heavier than the course count suggests, because clinical teaching does not work like classroom teaching. State boards of nursing cap how many students one instructor can supervise on a unit, so a clinical group is small and each one eats a full day of your week. Teach two clinical groups and two didactic courses and you have very little week left.

Then there's the invisible load. A course you've never taught takes a huge amount of prep the first time you run it. Grading care plans and clinical write-ups takes longer than grading exams. You'll advise students, sit on dissertation committees for other faculty, and hold office hours for people who are working night shifts and can only meet at odd times.

One thing worth knowing before you compare salaries: many faculty appointments are nine-month contracts. The $80,250 median for nursing instructors reflects what BLS collects, and faculty on academic-year appointments often add summer teaching, a grant-funded summer salary, or per diem clinical shifts on top. That doesn't close the gap with bedside nursing, but it changes the arithmetic for some people.

How Much Do Nursing Professors Make?

Postsecondary nursing instructors earn a median of $80,250. Registered nurses earn a median of $97,550. You will take a pay cut of roughly $17,300 at the median to move from the bedside into a nursing professor job, and the gap holds at every percentile in the table below. This is the honest centre of the whole decision, and any page that tells you a nursing PhD is a raise is not reading the same data.

The comparison gets worse if you were weighing a clinical doctorate instead. Nurse practitioners earn a median of $132,300 and nurse anesthetists earn $236,590. A nurse who wants more money has better options than teaching, and everybody who runs a nursing school knows it.

Where you teach moves the number a lot. Hawaii posts the highest state median for nursing instructors at $129,530, followed by the District of Columbia at $107,770 and Delaware at $98,170. At the other end, West Virginia sits at $62,210, Kansas at $62,870, and Arkansas at $63,090. Texas employs the most nursing instructors of any state at 6,830, then New York at 6,340 and California at 5,610. Full state-by-state numbers sit on the nursing professor salary page.

The top of the scale is genuinely good. The 90th percentile for nursing instructors is $129,500, which is a tenured full professor at a well funded school, usually with grant salary support and often with an administrative stipend attached. That number exists. It is just a long way from where you start.

Why Is There a Nursing Faculty Shortage?

Everyone in nursing education talks about the faculty shortage, and the wage data explains a good part of it without needing any other evidence. You're asking a nurse to spend four to six years on a doctorate, take on the opportunity cost of those years, and then accept a job that pays $80,250 against the $97,550 they were already earning. The nurse who finishes an NP program instead lands at a $132,300 median in a fraction of the time.

That is not a mystery, it's arithmetic. Schools cannot fill faculty lines because the lines pay less than the clinical jobs their candidates already hold, and the doctorate that qualifies you costs years of earning. The shortage isn't caused by a lack of qualified nurses. It's caused by the price of the job.

Which cuts both ways for you. Faculty positions are genuinely available, search committees are genuinely short of applicants with a research doctorate, and a nursing PhD holder who wants to teach is in a strong position to negotiate rank, start date, and track. Just do it knowing what the salary is, and read how people pay for the nursing PhD before you take on debt for a job at this pay grade. Debt plus an $80,250 salary is the combination that ruins this plan.

Can You Teach Nursing With a DNP Instead of a PhD?

Yes, and a lot of people do. A DNP qualifies you for clinical track faculty appointments, community college and undergraduate teaching, skills lab and clinical supervision, and plenty of assistant professor lines at teaching-focused universities. If your goal is to teach nursing students and you don't want to run a research program, the DNP is the faster and cheaper route to a nursing professor job.

What the nursing PhD buys you is the other half of the ladder. Tenure track appointments at research universities want a research doctorate. Chairing dissertations for doctoral students usually requires one. Federal research funding is written for people trained to design and defend a study, which is what the nursing PhD trains you to do and the DNP does not. If you want to build a research line, or work as a nurse scientist outside academia, that's the degree.

So decide what kind of faculty member you want to be, then pick. The PhD versus DNP guide works through the split in detail, and if you land on the research side, the campus nursing PhD ranking covers the 92 campus programs and the online ranking covers the 48 that run at a distance.