TUSCALOOSA, Ala. – Record numbers of students continue enrolling in The University of Alabama Capstone College of Nursing, and, increasingly, these students are male.

The UA nursing college’s overall enrollment was 884 students in fall 2004, a 99 percent increase from the 445 students enrolled in fall 2000 and the highest enrollment in the College’s 29-year history. In the same span, the number of men enrolled in the program has grown 154 percent, from 41 men to 104. While UA women nursing students still outnumber men more than 7 to 1, the gap is shrinking. In 2000, it was closer to 10 to 1.

Historically, UA, and the state as a whole, has drawn a higher than average percentage of males to nursing, said Dr. Sara Barger, dean of the Capstone College of Nursing, but results of the severe national nursing shortage are attracting bundles of students, including an increasingly large number of men. “It’s an economic thing,” Barger said. “As the shortage gets worse, salaries go up. As salaries go up, more people, including men, want to take advantage of that.”

Four of the 20 high school students registering for the recent Capstone Summer Nursing Academy were males, according to Pat McCullar, coordinator of nursing student recruitment at UA.

Men are frequently drawn to the nurse anesthetist career track, Barger said. “More than 50 percent of the males who come here in nursing are absolutely certain they wish to be nurse anesthetists,” she said. The specialty requires a master’s degree after the bachelor’s in nursing, and starting salaries are frequently in the $100,000 range.

The College does not specifically target men in student recruitment, but Barger said the College strives to present itself as a non-gender specific career option. Men are well represented among the College’s student ambassadors, who assist in student recruitment, and prospective students increasingly see male nurse role models when they look at health care delivery.

“They’ve got to see somebody who looks like them, who is successful, who they want to emulate,” Barger said. According to the Alabama Board of Nursing, the number of male nurses licensed in Alabama has grown from 3,697, during fiscal year 1999, to 5,072 in fiscal year 2005. These figures include both Registered Nurses and Licensed Practical Nurses.

Dr. Mitch Shelton, an assistant professor in the Capstone College of Nursing and assistant director for information technology in UA’s Institute for Rural Health Research, said men are more accepted in the nursing profession than when he began his career in the early 1980s.

“The attitudes have changed about male nurses,” Shelton said. “When I was in nursing school I was banned from doing clinicals at one hospital's labor and delivery room because I was a male. The funny thing about it was the patient, or the patient's family, did not have a problem with me. It was the charge nurse that would not allow it. I even had a nursing instructor suggest that males should not be a part of ‘our profession’.”

Additional qualified male and female nurses would bring welcome relief to the health care industry. More than 70 percent of hospital CEOs indicated their facilities had nursing shortages, according to an October 2004 report from The American College of Healthcare Executives. More new jobs are expected to be created for registered nurses, through 2012, than for any other profession, according to the U.S. Department of Labor.

The shortage was created by multiple issues, including the aging baby boomer population and nurses retiring at faster rates than people were entering the profession, Barger said. “We had 20 years where very few people were going into nursing,” Barger said. “We went from 25 percent of our nurses being under the age of 30 to 9 percent.”

Solving the issue isn’t as simple as finding qualified students to declare nursing as their major. Last semester at UA, for example, there were 64 available slots for student promotion into the professional portion of the nursing curriculum. The slots are limited, in part, because state law requires properly certified faculty members to supervise no more than eight students during the students’ clinical rotations at health care facilities.

The limited slots, and the growing interest in them, create a competitive environment, Barger said. UA is seeking to fill three additional nursing faculty positions and will promote 88 students into the professional curriculum in the fall. “As bad as the nursing shortage is, the nursing faculty shortage is worse,” Barger said.

As the demand for nurses grows and more students choose nursing as a major, competition increases among students, male and female, for the available slots. The latest group promoted had had the highest GPA ever, well over a 3.0.