There was a line outside my office.
I’d just stepped in as director of nursing for a pre-licensure program in trouble, and on one of my first days, there was a line of students waiting to talk to me. Not about coursework. They wanted to air grievances — about rules that kept changing, goals that shifted every semester, a program that felt like it was being rebuilt under their feet over and over. They were frustrated, they were anxious, and underneath both, they had stopped trusting that anyone in my chair would stay long enough to matter.
I was the third director that program had seen in under four years.
Down the hall, the faculty looked the way the students felt — jaded, withdrawn, going through the motions. The program’s pass rates had slipped below standard. A re-accreditation visit was coming. And the institutional knowledge required to prepare for it was scattered across binders and desks and people’s heads, because no one had been in the role long enough to own it. Every time a new director arrived, the work started over.
That program didn’t have a hiring problem. It had a continuity problem. And I’ve come to believe those are very different things — and that we keep solving for the first when the real damage is in the second.
What churn actually costs
When we talk about the nursing faculty shortage, we usually talk about vacancies — the roughly 1,600 unfilled full-time faculty positions, the 7%-plus vacancy rate, the qualified applicants turned away because there’s no one to teach them.¹ Those numbers are real and they matter.
But the number that tells the deeper story is this one: nearly a third of faculty vacancies now come from resignations, not retirements.² People aren’t just aging out. They’re leaving. And in program leadership specifically, that turnover sets off a chain reaction that a vacancy count never captures.
Here’s what each leadership transition actually does to a program:
It resets the clock on trust. Every new director walks in with their own philosophy, their own priorities, their own read on what the program should be. For faculty who’ve already survived two or three of these, the rational response is to stop investing. Why pour yourself into a curriculum redesign when the next director will just change it? Disengagement isn’t laziness. It’s self-protection against churn.
It destabilizes students. Students feel every transition, because the rules and the goals move with each new leader. They begin to doubt the program itself — whether it can actually get them to licensure — and they show it: complaints up the chain to leadership, negative reviews, a line outside the office. Student trust is one of the first casualties of leadership instability, and one of the slowest things to rebuild.
It breaks accreditation continuity. This is the one institutions underestimate most. Every leadership change has to be reported to the accrediting body — which is, at minimum, a bad look during a review cycle. But the deeper cost is that accreditation is a multi-year, cumulative effort, and the knowledge of where a program stands against its standards tends to live with its leaders. Lose the leader, lose the thread. The next person re-learns it from scratch, often while the visit looms. And the research is now explicit on this point: a program can meet every curricular standard and post strong NCLEX numbers and still falter in re-accreditation if faculty morale and turnover signal instability.³ Reviewers look behind the self-study to ask whether faculty feel supported. Churn is visible there, whether or not it’s named.
Each of these compounds the others. Disengaged faculty make accreditation prep harder. Anxious students generate noise that pulls leadership away from the structural work. And the harder it all gets, the faster the next director burns out and leaves — which starts the cycle again. This is why churn isn’t a one-time disruption. It’s a downward spiral with its own momentum.
Why the hire so often misses
Here’s the part I want to say carefully, because it’s aimed at the people doing the hiring.
In a lot of programs — especially nonprofits — there’s a real distance between executive leadership and the actual program. The C-suite lives in a different world than the faculty and students do, and when a leadership seat opens, the person they believe the program needs is often very different from what the program actually needs. You can feel that gap the moment you walk in: the disconnect between what the institution thinks it’s solving for and what’s actually broken on the ground.
So the seat gets filled — sometimes quickly, sometimes with someone capable — but the underlying instability doesn’t get addressed, because no one diagnosed it. A warm body in the director’s chair is not the same as continuity. And filling the role without stabilizing the foundation underneath it is how a program ends up on its third director in four years in the first place.
What stabilizing actually looks like
When I stepped into those programs, I didn’t start by leading. I started by listening — more than I spoke, for longer than felt comfortable.
I met with every faculty member, because the people doing the day-to-day work of the program know exactly where it’s breaking, and they’ve usually stopped being asked. I held open office hours for students, so the line outside my door became a channel instead of a crisis — a way for them to be heard and for me to understand what they were actually experiencing. I met with the C-suite to understand what the institution defined as success, because you can’t stabilize a program without knowing what the business needs from it. And I audited the program against its own outcomes and its accreditation standards early, so the re-accreditation visit stopped being a fire and started being a plan.
Only after all of that did I start changing things. Because the moves that actually stabilize a program aren’t the dramatic ones. They’re the unglamorous infrastructure: writing down the processes that lived only in someone’s head, so they survive the next transition. Building a faculty advisory structure so the program’s direction doesn’t depend entirely on whoever holds the director title. Defining priorities and long-term goals clearly enough that they outlast any single leader. Putting feedback loops in place with outcomes you can actually measure — faculty intent-to-stay, student satisfaction, accreditation readiness — instead of running on instinct.⁴
The goal, counterintuitively, is to make the program less dependent on its director, not more. A leader who makes themselves indispensable has just created the next single point of failure. The real work is building continuity that survives you — so that the next transition, whenever it comes, is a handoff instead of a reset.
The thing the vacancy count can’t see
The faculty shortage is real, and filling open roles matters. But if we only count vacancies, we miss the more expensive problem hiding underneath: programs that fill the seat and still can’t hold steady, because the instability was never structurally addressed. Continuity isn’t a person. It’s the trust, the documentation, the shared direction, and the infrastructure that lets a program stay itself through a transition.
That’s the work I find myself drawn to — not just stepping into the chair, but rebuilding what churn breaks.
If you’re a Dean, director, or faculty member living some version of this right now, you’re not imagining how hard it is — and you’re not alone in it. And if you’re the one making the hire: you may not need a permanent director tomorrow as much as you need someone to stabilize the accreditation timeline, rebuild faculty trust, and put continuity structures in place that survive the next transition. That’s a lot of what I do. You can start a conversation here.
References
- American Association of Colleges of Nursing, Nursing Faculty Shortage Fact Sheet; ATI Nursing Education, “5 Ways Nursing Education Leaders Can Enhance Faculty Development” (2026) — reporting a full-time faculty vacancy rate of 7.2% (~1,600 unfilled positions) for the 2025–2026 academic year. atitesting.com
- Wolters Kluwer, “Reimagining Academic Leadership” (2025), citing AACN 2024–2025 faculty data — nearly one-third (31.6%) of faculty vacancies stemmed from resignations. wolterskluwer.com
- “The Faculty Factor: Faculty Engagement and Retention in Accreditation Renewal,” Teaching and Learning in Nursing (2025) — programs can meet curricular standards and strong NCLEX rates yet falter in accreditation renewal when faculty turnover signals instability. sciencedirect.com
- American Organization for Nursing Leadership, Nurse Leadership Workforce Compendium: Strengthening Retention — structured mentorship, continuous-improvement processes, and defined outcome measures (turnover, intent-to-stay, satisfaction) as core retention infrastructure. aonl.org