Kansas Nursing Workforce Center releases comprehensive report on nursing education in Kansas

The first comprehensive report on the state of nursing education in Kansas was released today by the Kansas Nursing Workforce Center, based at the University of Kansas School of Nursing. The center was established in 2023 to address the shortage of nurses across Kansas.

“This report provides a broad and comprehensive view of nursing education across Kansas, based on comparative data and information from reliable national and state resources,” said Barbara MacArthur, M.N., FAAN, director of the Kansas Nursing Workforce Center and clinical assistant professor at KU School of Nursing. “The purpose of the report is to support the planning and decision-making for potential students and their advisors, educators, academic leaders and employers who share the goal of ensuring a well-prepared nursing workforce to care for Kansans when and where they are needed.”

As the report notes, there are not enough nurses in Kansas to meet the need for care, and many nurses plan to retire soon. Ensuring that Kansans have access to nursing care will require increasing the number of students in prelicensure nursing programs, as well as retaining the existing nursing workforce.

The report published today provides data on enrollees such as age, gender and parental status as well as an in-depth data analysis that describes Kansas prelicensure programs: Bachelor of Science in Nursing (BSN), RN (registered nurse) to BSN, Associate Degree in Nursing (ADN) and Practical Nursing (PN).

The report also identifies leaks in the nursing education pipeline as well as some bright spots.

Brights spots include:

• New student admissions showed improvement from 2024 to 2025 for all program types.
• Kansas graduates outpaced national averages for licensure examination pass rates.
• Graduate employment and wages show strong and sustained growth.

Some key challenges are:

• Across all programs, the number of approved nursing seats have increased, but not all those spots are being filled; Kansas nursing programs added 867 approved seats between 2020 and 2025. Nonetheless, total enrollment has declined.
• Kansas programs reported 32.5% unfilled seats, according to the 2023 Kansas Nursing Education Dashboard.
• Completion and graduation trends are inconsistent or declining among programs.

More research is needed to learn more about these gaps, MacArthur said. For example, nationally, the most common reason cited for not accepting all qualified applicants was faculty shortages, but other factors could be limited classroom space, budget constraints and limited availability of clinical sites. Further understanding is necessary to identify specific reasons for the mismatch between approved, available and unfilled seats.

“The more we understand about nursing education pathways, the better we can develop strategies and tactics to improve where the challenges are,” said MacArthur.

In addition to Kansas Board of Regents, data sources for the report include the Kansas State Board of Nursing, the National Council of State Boards of Nursing, the Accreditation Commission for Education in Nursing and the American Association of Colleges of Nursing and the National Council Licensure Examination. A special topics section includes information on wage trends, apprenticeships, Kansas nursing preceptors and nursing residency programs.