At a time when the Covid-19 pandemic has exposed a growing shortage of nurses, it should have been good news that there were more than 1,200 applicants to enter the associate degree program in nursing at Long Beach City College.

But the community college took only 32 of them.

North of here, California State University, East Bay isn’t enrolling any nursing students at all until at least next fall.

Higher education was struggling to keep up with the skyrocketing demand for nurses even before the Covid crisis. Now it’s falling further behind.

Health protocols are limiting in-person instruction. Nursing teachers are quitting in large numbers, while others are nearing retirement. Hospitals are stretched too thin to provide required hands-on clinical training. And budgets are so constrained that student nurses are forced to buy their own personal protection equipment, or PPE.

“What worries people, if Covid continues on and takes its toll, is will people still enroll in nursing programs?” asked Peter Buerhaus, a nurse, economist and professor at Montana State University who studies the nursing workforce.

All of this is only amplifying the existing demand for nurses.

Estimates of the problem vary dramatically, from a projected shortage of 510,394 registered nurses nationwide by 2030, based on a formula used by scholars at the Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine and elsewhere, to a predicted shortfall in some states by then but a surplus in others, according to federal forecasts.

Experts agree, however, that shortages will be worst in the West and South. California alone needs to turn out more than 65,000 new nurses, medical and dental assistants, health IT specialists and community health workers a year, according to Futuro Health, a nonprofit created jointly by the health care company Kaiser Permanente and a principal union representing health care workers in the state.*

Read the full article about nursing shortage by Matt Krupnick at The Hechinger Report.