School of Nursing and Health Sciences receives $150,000 Faculty Lines Grant

By Shannon Curley
Collegian Staff
January 24, 2007

The La Salle University Nursing Department received a $150,000 Faculty Lines Grant from the Pennsylvania Higher Education Foundation (PHEF) and Independence Blue Cross that will assist professors who are going for their doctorate.

“This is a great partnership between Independence Blue Cross, Pennsylvania Higher Education Foundation and the nursing [community] in the commonwealth,” Dr. Zane Robinson Wolf, dean of the School of Nursing, said.

The applications for the Faculty Lines Grant were blindly viewed, meaning applications were submitted and reviewed by a panel who did not know where an application came from. About 55 applications were submitted, and La Salle was one of the 11 chosen to be awarded the grant. The grant went into effect in September 2006. It is divided into three parts, or $50,000 a year for three years.

Wolf and a committee of nursing directors have allocated the money for this semester to nine professors who are going for their doctorate on the nursing faculty. Each of the people selected had to meet certain criteria. For instance, their dissertation must be related to nursing. They have to be full-time faculty and be currently enrolled in a doctorate program. Each recipient has a great deal of clinical experience.

The grant was developed by PHEF in cooperation with Independence Blue Cross in response to a national nursing faculty shortage.

This deficiency in faculty directly affects the number of nurses who join the workforce, which ends up contributing to the clinical nursing shortage.

“If you really want to increase enrollment in nursing programs so that ultimately there are more nurses to serve the commonwealth... you need nursing faculty,” Wolf said. “In academia, you definitely don’t make as much as you would in other settings.”

A May 2006 article for the American Association of University Professors Web site by Susan A. LaRocco, an associate professor at Curry College, says that “75 percent of colleges cited too few faculty as the major reason for denying admission to qualified students.”

As qualified students are turned away from universities across the country, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics projected that the country will need about 1.2 million new nurses by the year 2014. According to a Nursing Management Aging Workforce Survey, 55 percent of the nurses polled planned to retire between 2011 and 2020.

Efforts by the nursing community, in conjunction with organizations such as the PHEF and Independence Blue Cross, such as the Faculty Lines Grant, are being made to curtail this process.

curleys1@lasalle.edu