Educating to Exhaustion: Intention to Leave Among US Full-Time Nursing Faculty

In this episode, host Dr. Steven Palazzo speaks with Dr. Jacqueline Christianson about her study, Educating to Exhaustion: Intention to Leave U.S. Full-Time Nursing Faculty, published in Nursing Education Perspectives. Their conversation explores the growing nursing faculty shortage and examines how workload demands, inadequate rewards, and burnout contribute to faculty members’ intentions to leave academia. Dr. Christianson discusses key findings from a national survey of nursing faculty and highlights practical strategies for improving retention, including fostering autonomy, recognizing contributions, strengthening leadership support, and creating meaningful workplace connections. She also emphasizes that while salary remains an important factor, no single solution exists for addressing faculty burnout. This episode offers valuable insights for nursing education leaders seeking to build healthier work environments and sustain the academic nursing workforce.

Christianson, J., Malin, K., Leiberg, J., Grabert, L., Moser, S., & Zemlak, J. (2026). Educating to Exhaustion: Intention to Leave Among US Full-Time Nursing Faculty. Nursing education perspectives, 47(2), 86–95. https://doi.org/10.1097/01.NEP.0000000000001492

Dedicated to excellence in nursing, the National League for Nursing is the leading organization for nurse faculty and leaders in nursing education. Find past episodes of the NLN Nursing EDge podcast online. Get instant updates by following the NLN on LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, Bluesky, and YouTube. For more information, visit NLN.org.

Transcript

0:09

Welcome to this episode of NLN Nursing EDge Unscripted. I'm your host, Dr. Steven Palazzo, a member of the editorial board of Nursing Education Perspectives. This series highlights the published work from nursing education perspectives and explores how nurse educators are advancing teaching learning and the academic workforce. In this episode, we will examine the article educating to exhaustion intention to leave us full-time nursing faculty. This work led by Dr. Jacqueline Christianson, an assistant professor at Marquette University College of Nursing, whose scholarship focuses on nursing faculty workforce issues, burnout, and work environment dynamics. This article is in the March April edition of Nursing Education Perspectives. The study addresses a critical issue in nursing education, the growing faculty shortage and the factors driving faculty away from academic roles. The authors explore how work efforts, rewards, and burnout interact to influence faculty members intention to leave. The findings highlight a concerning reality. A substantial portion of full-time nursing faculty report a likelihood of leaving their role within the next 3 years with key drivers including burnout, dissatisfaction with rewards, and opportunities for higher salary outside of academia. Faculty often experience high levels of effort, including heavy workloads, overcommitment, and work extending beyond contracted hours. At the same time, rewards such as salary, benefits, and recognition are frequently perceived as insufficient. This imbalance contributes directly to burnout, which in turn plays a critical mediating role in the decision to leave academic positions. I want to welcome our guest today, Dr. Jacqueline Christensen. Hello. How are you? Hello. I'm very well. Thank you for having me. Well, we're very happy to have you here and let's just get started. So, the study highlights burnout as a mediator effect between effort and reward imbalance and intention to leave. How can nursing programs redesign faculty roles to reduce burnout while maintaining academic rigor? Sure. So, first thing I think to be perfectly clear, I don't think that faculty burnout and academic rigor themselves are at odds at all. I think it's actually quite the opposite that academic rigor and faculty burnout are at odds in the sense that some faculty feel that they have insufficient access to ensuring academic rigor as one of the factors for burnout. So as a little bit of context for this study this study was a survey a national survey of nursing faculty who are currently in the nursing faculty role at an accredited college of nursing in the United States. And we actually did two different analyses on this data. The first analysis is the one that's published in nursing education perspectives that you just mentioned. We have a second manuscript that's actually under revision. That's a qualitative manuscript to evaluate not just what the numbers were as far as burnout measures and things like that in the quantitative study, but also how faculty describe their role, what they describe as exhausting, what they describe as things that are invigorating. And we really found in that some of that context helped understand this a bit better. So a lot of faculty really get a lot out of some of the light bulb moments and the aha moments that students get as a part of academic rigor and they found that they got a lot of energy and fulfillment and felt rewarded by that. On the other side of things on the opposite end there's also that a lot of faculty feel that there is some degree of encouragement to lower academic standards or to push students through and those types of things really sap the passion out of nurse educators. So I personally don't think that academic rigor and faculty burnout are even a little bit at odds. I think that a lot of us go into the academic role with the intention of pushing through nursing students who are excellent and who are well-prepared for their roles and that's what we want to do for the most part. I think a lot of places that the academic work balancing act could be really be adjusted. There's really a lot of areas that you could adjust multiple different things and address multiple problems at the same time. So as an example of that, we found one of the big contributors to the efforts variable in the structural equation modeling was how many hours that faculty were reported working weekly and then also an instrument called overcommitment or was a variable called overcommitment which is basically the idea of how well can you disconnect from your job when you are no longer at work. So having that work life almost spillover sort of effect. It's something that some of our folks in the qualitative side of things described as well that the work almost feels like it's never ending and that over-commitment piece is there. On the reward side of the model though, there's a big contributor to poor sense of rewards for was service work which is stuff that's really often under acknowledged and underappreciated and feels like busy work to a lot of us that we don't really get a lot of acknowledgement for even though it is necessary and vital work for the college to continue to function. So, as I kind of put it, nobody became a teacher because they love sitting on committees. But yet we still have to do those types of things and they often take up more and more and more of our time, especially as you become an academic who has more experience or who has who moves up in the academic ranks. So, there's a few things that we could do to make that simple example of committees more bearable. you know, committee meetings could have things like light snacks or a light meal, or there could be better acknowledgement and visibility to what works those committees are doing. So, where I work over at Marquette, we actually had a committee that made arrangements for a Girl Scout troop to come visit our simulation lab. And there was a lot of, hurrah about that event and it was really, something that was really uplifting for the whole college, not just the people who are working on that committee. But when committee work is more visible and you know more glamorous if you'd like to say I think that some of those some of those lack of fulfillment around that work can make it feel less like busy work and more like something that you do get reward out of. If you really wanted to be radical and I'm happy to be radical you could also consider consolidating committees. And a lot of us have noticed that the amount and number of committees at universities and colleges have expanded over the years and is that really necessary? How often do they need to meet and really having administrators take a critical look at how much of this work is needed, how much of this work is helpful. That kind of thing can also be really helpful to making better use of that time. Oh well given what you just said and the satisfaction with rewards not just salary strongly influence attention to leave. What non- salary strategies can institutions implement to improve faculty retention? You spoke briefly about committees and you know giving more recognition to those who are on committees you know promoting your committees more consolidating your committees but what else would you suggest? So first thing to be clear we talk about salary and non- salary in the manuscript. I don't the manuscript actually in our quantitative analysis didn't find that salary was a big contributor to the efforts or to the reward sub variable specifically. And I think that that is not at all to mean that salary isn't a problem. Salary is absolutely a problem. It's just a different problem for what our structural equation model evaluated. So, we were looking at people who had already largely self- selected to take a salary cut to become educators rather than people who are prospectively looking at becoming an educator. I think that there's likely a tipping point at which one has an idea of why they want to become a nursing faculty. they accept that salary cut and they do so. But then that there's a disconnect that happens somewhere in there where you wanted to become a nurse faculty because perhaps you wanted to be a part of educating the next generation of nursing students. But if you feel that there are barriers to doing that, that salary cut that you took seems silly if you look at it and you start to critically evaluate whether this job is working for you or not. I think that when you're at that point where you're trying to think of what your what your future looks like, if you're not getting fulfillment out of a job, then the salary cut starts to make less and less sense. And I think that that's where the salary piece really comes in. So I think that's part of why our model didn't capture that piece. In part because the self- selection piece is already there. But the reality is that among in our study at least the top reason for intention to leave for the 40% of faculty who reported they do have intention to leave the top reason was retirement and about 27% of them indicated they plan to retire. I qualify that as a almost like a non-modifiable risk factor for intention to leave. Ultimately everybody wants to retire. Either you retire or you die in your job you know and there's either way there's turnover in that sense right. But the second reason was something that's preventable and that was the salary was the second top reason. So I think that I want to qualify what I'm about to say about non- salary strategies as I think that they're very important, but I don't think the salary piece can entirely be ignored with this either. But to actually answer your question, there's a lot of really non- salary strategies that can be used to improve faculty retention. So, in the qualitative analysis that really kind of informs the some of the other parts of this study, autonomy and the ability to self-determine were really big satisfiers. The ability to try to set most of your own schedule. So, when I'm doing grading work, I could do it today or I could do it tomorrow, you know. And having some degree of flexibility was very important to the faculty that answered those questions. On the opposite side of things, the opposite was a detractor for a lot of people. So participants who felt micromanaged or who felt that college administrators didn't support things like having appropriate boundaries between students and faculty. So if a student you know emails you asking for extra credit and you say no and then they you know continue to harass you about extra credit not having an appropriate boundary there. If administrators don't support that boundary then that can be a dissatisfier because it's a limit to your autonomy right. So the autonomy piece was really important for folks. The other thing that was really the acknowledgement piece and feeling like one's contributing positively to the nursing profession was the other big piece of it. So and those acknowledgements can really be as simple as just during faculty meetings saying hey this particular faculty member got a grant to you know a simulation lab grant to fund a new mannequin or as simple as this person got a publication or you know we made it to the end of the semester you know hooray. Things like that, but they can be as formal and as complex, I guess you could say, as things like a faculty Daisy Award. The Daisy Award actually does exist for nursing faculty. Our university just started doing it within the last year or two, and it's something that people definitely feel acknowledged and respected out of. Ultimately I think that leadership in nursing schools really have a big impact on faculty satisfaction and that the acknowledgement piece can often come from the leadership being willing to acknowledge what faculty are doing and to celebrate those things. Well, you hit on some very good points there and when I was reading the article you know there was a suggestion made that the effort, reward and burnout are interdependent rather than isolated factors. So how should academic leaders like myself approach faculty workload and role expectations differently in light of this interconnected model? So I think acknowledging that every piece is interconnected with one another is the important part here. And I kind of mentioned earlier that you can really address multiple different components with one or two interventions. So like I mentioned earlier with committee work if you reconsider how much committee work you're doing you could potentially impact not just over commitment but in faculty work hours but also their satisfaction with committee work. If you're getting more done in the one meeting a month versus the one meeting a week that's that can be a satisfier for some people. There's a lot of ways that you can find efficiencies in that way where you have one thing that you're doing that targets multiple different little sub-variables I guess you could call them at the same time. I think that there's also it's also important to acknowledge that there is no one magic bullet that fixes all faculty burnout problems in one intervention. So I mentioned the Daisy Award. I personally don't really feel a lot of acknowledgement out of, you know, getting a kudos in a meeting or something like a Daisy Award. Personally, it's just not something that I'm really into. But it very much is something that other people are into. And just because I'm not into it doesn't mean that it shouldn't exist. In the same way, I would get a lot out of having a reduced having reduced meeting hours from doing committee work personally. That's something that I would get a lot of improved reward satisfaction out of. Being able to get more done in a shorter period of time than perhaps somebody else does. I'm sure there the person that loves committee work does exist out there. So having multiple different things that you're doing that are perhaps all seem small by themselves and are minor changes. Those things do add up over time. And I think that really being conscientious about not just trying one thing at a time, but trying multiple different small things at a time can be more impactful than trying to find the magic bullet that I'm not convinced exists. Well, that's interesting. You say you're not convinced that a magic bullet exists because I was just going to ask you a question. I mean, we've been talking about this for years, decades, right? Oh, absolutely. And I'm not sure we've made much progress. And so, what's your sense of I don't want to say magic bullet, but what's your sense of the main driving force behind this feeling of burnout and this feeling of what many of the educators report? I mean I hear it wherever I go, right? About this sense of leaving academia. What do you hear? What is your sense? So I'm a little bit insulated. I will admit that I'm relatively lucky that the place that I work the satisfaction for faculty is actually pretty good. That is not the common experience that said so I have a little bit of insulation from hearing and seeing outside of this study unfortunately or fortunately I guess. I think that when you're, I think the overall sense is there sometimes it can feel very feudal to be a nursing professor and having mechanisms in place or you know other people in place to either air out that feeling of futility or to refute that feeling of futility can really be helpful. Personally I teach pathophysiology and I used to teach pharmacology as well. They're the classes that a lot of nursing students frankly kind of dread because yeah they're allegedly the difficult classes, right? I think they're fun to teach because the science is really what attracts me to nursing in the first place, but it can feel very feudal, especially when you have a student who's say struggling and you can you can almost see where the problem is and you can help them try to identify where the problem is. It's kind of that old idiom, you can bring a horse to water, but you can't make them drink. And having a space both to acknowledge that and to celebrate when those wins do happen, is really important. I think that peer support groups can be really helpful, especially for new faculty because that feeling of futility in the faculty role is really not terribly different from that feeling of futility when you're a brand new nurse and you feel like you couldn't do enough. It's something that you learn to understand better and to intern internalize less as you get more experience. But a lot of colleges of nursing don't have that transitional piece. The have a peer support group or have a have an education mentor or things like that. So there's a lot of small pieces that really can contribute to helping people feel more like their work is meaningful even during times when their work does not feel meaningful. Well, that's some great insights and I appreciate you sharing them with us. You know, this is a conversation that's going to continue for I'm afraid to say many, many more years and decades probably. I don't know what the solution is. You know, as you said, you can't take salary out of the equation, but salary is not the only variable in the equation. You touched on autonomy, support, feeling like you're making a difference, acknowledgement, recognition, those kinds of things that you know also are things we hear from colleagues in the clinical space, too. So, it seems to be a little endemic to nursing as a as a general rule, and I'm sure there's other professions, too, that have similar experiences. But, this is great to have the conversation continue. The article was very informative. I enjoyed reading it. I encourage those who are listening to please take a look at Nursing Education Perspectives March and April edition this year and look for the article. And I want to thank you Dr. Christianson for joining us, Jackie. It was a wonderful conversation and we really appreciate your time you spent with us. Yeah, thank you so much for having me. Just to give an extra little plug to the article, it is open access to those of you who don't necessarily subscribe or have subscriptions. So please do check it out.