ACADEMIA Letters Interdisciplinary Faculty: A Tool to Address Faculty Shortages in Baccalaureate and Graduate Nursing Programs Jenette L. Smith, Clarkson College Miguel A. Perez, California State University, Fresno The nursing profession is facing critical stafng shortages, and the ever-increasing shortage of nursing faculty is a growing concern. Currently, qualifed applicants of nursing schools are being turned away, class sizes are larger, and there are fewer nurses in the job market (Williamson, 2019). The literature documents a nurse faculty vacancy rate of 7.2% in the United States (American Association of Colleges of Nursing, AACN, 2020), and full-time va- cancies were reported by 57.9% of schools (Bittner & Bechtel, 2017). The American Nurses Association (n.d.) advised that by 2022, there will be more than 100,000 RN positions avail- able per year - more than in any other profession. Indeed, the projected employment growth for registered nurses is eight percentage points higher than what is expected for all other oc- cupations combined (University of Saint Mary, n.d.). Findings from 892 nursing programs in the United States revealed that, as of October 2019, there were 1,637 faculty vacancies. An additional 134 faculty positions will be needed to meet student demand, and most of the faculty vacancies (89.7%) are faculty positions either preferring or requiring a doctoral degree (AACN, 2020, Scope of the Nursing Faculty Shortage section). Given the increasing number of faculty position shortages, it is unsurprising that over 80,407 qualifed applicants were not accepted by nursing programs in 2019-2020. Most of the study respondents identifed faculty shortages as one of the reasons for not accepting all qualifed applicants into baccalaureate nursing programs (AACN, 2020). Compounding the nurse and nursing faculty shortage is the fact that clinical and private settings entice current and potential nurse educators with higher paying positions. The aver- Academia Letters, November 2021 Corresponding Author: Jenette L. Smith, smithjenette@clarksoncollege.edu Citation: Smith, J.L., Perez, M.A. (2021). Interdisciplinary Faculty: A Tool to Address Faculty Shortages in Baccalaureate and Graduate Nursing Programs. Academia Letters, Article 4096. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL4096. 1 ©2021 by the authors — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0