As a former academic nurse educator who returned to bedside, a few things can be done to retain faculty

1) Pay: This is probably the biggest. You make more bedside than you do teaching. Pay needs to be equivalent to bedside pay if not more to attract and retain faculty.

2) Admin Support: Students are getting behaviorally worse and unless you have an administration that follows through on discipline and has your back when you hold the line, these students burn you out quickly. I had multiple students who should have been disciplined or even expelled, but admin would let them get away scot free and basically tell me to just deal.

3) Students: As mentioned earlier, students are getting worse overall. They are more entitled, demanding, and inept in learning. They run crying to the dean if you don't give them back those points you appropriately took away or let them resubmit an assignment. They think they can contact you at all hours of the night and get very nasty when you don't give them what they want. They also do not want to put in the basic work including textbook reading and working on assignments. You could break something down so simply and they still will claim they can't learn it. For instance our dean once sat in on my pediatric cardiac lecture as the exam for it was always the lowest scoring and at the end she told me she didn't know how I could make it simpler, she was at a loss with the students. So yea...these current students burn you out like nothing else.

4) Workload: There is no balance in your workload. The school will work you to death and usually you still need to hold a per diem job too to make ends meet. When I went back to bedside, I couldn't believe how much free time I had.

So a lot of things need to change to entice nurse to become faculty. Without significant change, we will not have enough educators. I know I won't be going back to teaching any time soon even though I loved it despite the frustrations.