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Nurses Entering Workforce Later in Life

The number of people in their mid-20s who are becoming nurses is at its lowest point in 40 years. But a recent study reported in the journal Health Affairs (January/February 2007) concludes that the predicted nurse shortage will be smaller than previously forecast because large numbers of people are entering the profession in their late 20s and early 30s. The authors believe that declining interest in the nursing profession might have been a “temporary lull” and confined primarily to younger people choosing their first career.

The researchers found that those born in the 1970s are entering the nursing workforce at nearly the same levels as did the baby boomers in the 1950s. Among those born in the mid-1950s, by age 23, about 1.2 percent (1,200 per 100,000 U.S. residents) were RNs. As this group aged into their 30s and 40s, participation in the nursing profession grew, leveling off at about 2,000 fulltime equivalent (FTE) employees per 100,000 by age 50.

In contrast, among those born 10 years later, participation was about 20 percent lower at every age. But when the authors examined the contingent born in the mid-1970s, they found that though fewer (than their predecessors born in the 1960s) had become RNs by their early 20s, by age 29 there were nearly as many RN FTEs among this portion as there were among those born from 1953 through 1955, which, the authors say “produced the largest number of RNs in the U.S. workforce ever.”

This analysis does not mean that the nurse shortage is nearing an end. The vacancy rate for nurses would still be significant — about 340,000 by 2020, instead of a previously projected shortfall of 760,000. Plus those nurses will be older. Since more people are starting their nursing careers at a later age, the authors project that by 2012 the average nurse age will creep up to 44.9 years. The current average is 43.4 years.

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