Is the nursing shortage really a teacher shortage? Potential Solutions As the U.S. population ages and the Affordable Care Act continues to be implemented, the need to address the shortage of nurses and faculty is more pressing than ever. However, to get to the heart of the problem, it is a multi-dimensional problem; we must ask ourselves what are the main factors contributing to such shortages and what can be done to prevent them? Perhaps the most significant influence of the nursing shortage is the fact that each year a large number of qualified applicants are denied entry due to the lack of prepared nurse educators (American Association of Colleges of Nursing , 2014). Just as troubling, if not more so, according to a 2014 AACN survey, there is already an 8.3% faculty vacancy rate, coupled with the age of faculty with PhDs and a master's degree which is 61.3 years. According to Gerolamo and Roemer (2011), faculty shortages have been identified as the primary reason why qualified nursing applicants are denied access to nursing programs. Nursing schools in the United States turned away more than 78,000 qualified applicants to baccalaureate and graduate nursing programs in 2013 due to insufficient faculty; therefore, it is clearly a significant contributor to the shortage (American Association of Colleges of Nursing, 2014). If the faculty shortage problem is not addressed quickly, it will result in insufficient nursing staff, which will likely prove detrimental to the healthcare system as a whole (Gerolamo, Overcash, McGovern, Roemer, & Bakewell-Sachs, 2014 ). Based on this evidence, it is imperative that nursing faculty be put at the forefront of addressing a persistent nursing shortage. if this is not done now, it could also prove to be too little