In many areas, the barrier to entry isn’t nursing school, but the training that comes afterward. Sochalski said that where she works in Philadelphia, there are a handful of nursing schools, but a limited number of hospitals and clinics, meaning a limited number of clinical places where fledgling nurses can gain practical experience.

Many health-care providers also shy away from recruiting these newer nurses, Cipriano explained. “When we think about nurses replacing retiring nurses, there is an experience gap,” she said. “People like me who have 40 years of experience will be replaced by individuals with three to five years of experience. Employers need to focus on the fact that they have a responsibility and a burden to ensure that new nurses can maintain expertise and wisdom at a patient’s side.”

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It seems as though every expert, group, or academic study has a different take on just how dire the nursing shortage will become. Ed Salsberg, a researcher at the George Washington University School of Nursing who studies nursing-workforce issues, said the country’s evolving health-care system is one variable that may affect projections.

“The health-care delivery system has put in a lot of effort to make the system more efficient and effective, to reduce unnecessary use of health-care services and reduce hospital readmissions,” Salsburg said. “We don’t know for sure whether this is going to increase or decrease demand for nurses. It’s one of the big questions as we look towards the future.” Thus far, he explained, the Affordable Care Act has not contributed significantly to the rising demand for nursing services, because most people newly insured under the ACA skew young and healthy.

To Salsburg, America is not facing a national nursing shortage so much as grappling with a “problem of distribution”—some health-care markets in the U.S. have a plentiful supply of nurses, with other regions feeling the scarcity more acutely.

In a 2012 paper titled “United States Registered Nurse Workforce Report Card and Shortage Forecast,” researchers forecasted RN job shortages in each state and assigned a letter grade accordingly. They predicted that the number of states meeting the criteria for a D or F would increase from five in 2009 to 30 by 2030. All 12 states projected to receive an F are in the South and the West: Florida, Georgia, Texas, Virginia, Alaska, Arizona, California, Hawaii, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, and New Mexico.

Vernon Lin, one of the authors of this study and a professor at the Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine, said he has experienced the nursing shortage throughout his career, across states and health-care systems.

“When I was working in Long Beach, we had over 20 nursing vacancies at any one time. And this was in sunny Southern California, close to the beach, for a job with federal-government benefits,” Lin said. “I began to look into the situation and, lo and behold, for the past 20 to 30 years, California has only produced 50 percent of the nurses it needed.”