There's an acute nursing shortage in the United States, but schools are turning away thousands of qualified applicants as they struggle to expand class size and hire more teachers for nursing programs. In 2017, nursing schools turned away more than 56,000 qualified applicants from undergraduate nursing programs. Going back a decade, nursing schools have annually rejected around 30,000 applicants who met admissions requirements, according to the American Association of Colleges of Nursing. "It shocks and upsets me that there are so many hurdles to get into nursing school when we have a nursing shortage," said Kay. "As we try to increase the number of nursing students, these three areas will be bottlenecks for nursing programs."

Source: CNN April 30, 2018 12:51 UTC