Saw this and had to post it: http://articles.baltimoresun.com/201...current-nurses

Driven by two trends — the graying of the profession and a bedeviling national nursing shortage — Baltimore-area colleges and universities are expanding programs to not only train the next generation of nurses but address a looming shortage in their own faculty ranks.

New, accelerated graduate programs at schools such as the Johns Hopkins University School of Nursing and Stevenson University have been formed recently to make it more convenient for current nurses to obtain advanced degrees, and hopefully use those newly acquired skills to train other nurses.

Other programs are aimed at students trying to break into the field that's expected to be a bright spot in a dismal job market. The College of Notre Dame of Maryland, for instance, is starting an entry-level bachelor's degree next fall.

Several new post-baccalaureate certificate programs at the University of Maryland School of Nursing also were approved this year by the Maryland Higher Education Commission, the state agency that reviews college curriculum, in addition to other new programs. And a couple of applications are pending, including at Coppin State University, which is seeking to create a doctorate in nursing.

The student demand is intense. U.S. nursing schools turned away 54,991 qualified applicants from baccalaureate and graduate nursing programs in 2009, according to the American Association of Colleges of Nursing. Area college officials say they do have plenty of applicants but are limited in how many students they can accept because of the small size of their programs.

"Schools can't accept all the interested applicants," said Judith Feustle, an associate dean of nursing in the graduate and professional studies school at Stevenson University. "We know we need to get more educators."

Like most of the country, Maryland is facing a shortage of nurses as the population ages and needs more medical care. Some health care experts think the problem could worsen as federal reform extends insurance coverage to thousands of new patients when it is fully implemented in 2014.

State labor officials expect a shortfall of 12,300 nurses in Maryland by 2015. Nationally, more than 1 million new nurses will be needed to replace those leaving the profession and to serve the growing number of people expected to need medical care, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.