Hey Industry, Stop Sponging Off, and Start Contributing to, the Colleges That Train Your Employees

In the 2025–2026 academic year, American nursing programs turned away 93,176 qualified applicants, the highest number ever recorded, and nearly 30,000 more than just two years earlier. These were not students who failed their prerequisites; they met every requirement. The doors were closed to them because the schools lacked open seats. The reasons? There are not enough professors because a nurse who teaches earns far less than a nurse who practices. Experienced clinicians cannot afford to change sectors. Nor do many small- and medium-sized institutions have the financial means to fund student scholarships and the facilities and specialized equipment necessary for training.

At the same time, the healthcare industry has spent years warning of a catastrophic nursing shortage. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the estimated annual openings for registered nurses (RNs) will be 189,100 through the year 2034. The shortage of full-time RNs is expected to be 267,000 nationally by 2028. Yet the hospitals and healthcare systems that desperately need nurses are not paying to produce them. That cost lands on universities and, ultimately, on students, their families, and the taxpayers who fund public higher education in the United States. The pipeline to alleviate a scarcity everyone insists is a national emergency is so narrow it can only trickle. Still, the industries downstream (the ones who will hire graduates) are nowhere to be seen at the production source (colleges and universities), where a modest investment would widen the pipeline permanently. This is true in many other fields beside nursing, from cybersecurity to data analytics.

The philanthropic landscape supporting nursing is surprising. Despite the growing awareness of the nursing shortage since COVID-19, “private giving for the nursing profession is just one penny of every dollar given for health care,” according to a 2023 American Nurses Foundation report. Most major gifts to nursing programs have been funded by individuals, family foundations, and community foundations that support large institutions. Leonard A. Lauder, heir to the Estée Lauder cosmetics fortune, and his $125 million gift to the University of Pennsylvania’s Nursing School; Bill and Joanne Conway’s donation of over $80 million to the Catholic University of America, the University of Virginia, and Virginia Commonwealth University; and Mark and Robyn Jones’s $100 million to Montana State University are high-profile examples. Very few of the major contributors are health care corporations.  

In most cases, institutions, especially small- and medium- sized schools in rural areas, are expected to foot the bill. The nursing program at Reinhardt University, a small private school in the petite city of Waleska, Georgia, for example, produces approximately 40 graduates per year. The students routinely have a 100 percent pass rate on the N-CLEX test (the standardized test used to license nurses) and go on to serve in primarily underserved areas of the state. And yet, during the 2024-2025 fiscal year, the institution received just $25,000 in annual financial support from the regional healthcare sector, despite severe regional needs. Meanwhile, Northside Hospital, Inc., a non-profit healthcare system with a facility in Cherokee County (where Reinhardt is located), recorded profits of $290 million in 2024 and had the highest per-patient revenue in Metro Atlanta, which includes Emory University and its hospitals. Georgia has fewer registered nurses per resident than the national average, faces a shortage of nursing faculty, and is expected to have one of the largest nursing shortages in the country by 2038. With additional resources, faculty, scholarships, and laboratories could be funded to increase capacity and produce more high-quality nurses.

Even as demands on higher education to churn out RNs climb, corporate giving to the sector fell 9.9 percent in 2024. The issue of a health care sector that relies on publicly subsidized higher education to train its workforce should not be simply reduced to a lack of high-minded private sector giving, but—given that philanthropy is currently the primary mechanism by which health care pays into its talent pipeline—there is little other measurement to go by.

Joseph Fuller, a Harvard University Business School professor who co-leads its Managing the Future of Work project, has spent years documenting this behavior. Employers, he argues, treat colleges as talent suppliers while refusing to invest in them: declining to help shape curricula, build capacity, and fund faculty, programs, or scholarships. The same employers then complain about the skill and workforce gaps wrought by their own lack of investment.

The answer is for industry to pay into its own pipeline. And a few promising programs show that when this happens, students, colleges, and employers all win. In Georgia, the Wellstar health system committed nearly $9 million over five years to fund nursing scholarships, and, crucially, new faculty at Kennesaw State University. Enrollment more than doubled from 512 students to over 1,150. “The Wellstar School of Nursing hired an additional 32 faculty members and 12 support staff employees,” and “added new sections of several nursing courses and skill labs, coinciding with Wellstar expanding its clinical nurse training opportunities and sites available to KSU students,” Kennesaw State announced in 2024.

Florida’s Linking Industry to Nursing Education, or LINE Fund, now uses state funds to pull hospitals and nursing schools into partnerships, matching health care companies’ contributions to institutions dollar for dollar to support student scholarships and internships, faculty recruitment, and equipment. This is not charity, nor a bailout: In this model, the cost of the workforce training these industries profit from finally shows up on the correct ledger. Scaled up, the same logic points to a training levy. Since 2027, the United Kingdom has funded apprenticeships through a 0.5 percent payroll charge on large employers—money that can be spent only on training. Analysts at the New America Foundation have argued the United States should study the model, noting that states such as Minnesota already levy a small workforce fee on payroll.

Another idea is to build a “workforce trust,” modeled after the tobacco and opioid settlements that required companies to pay into a settlement fund. A higher education version would assess the industries that hire from campuses and lock the funds, by law, to finance faculty, program operations, clinical placements, and scholarships. Massachusetts already runs a workforce trust seeded this way, in part: Funded by allocating a small surcharge collected for unemployment insurance fees from employers, the trust then reinvests in workforce development through grants to small- and medium-sized businesses and higher education institutions. 

The gap between higher education’s current funding and capacity and the workforce needs it is expected to serve extends across industries. For example, the Bureau of Labor Statistics 10-year employment projections for 2024–2034 and its monthly Labor Review indicate that social services professions will see 6.6 percent growth. In data science and quantitative roles, the need will focus on actuaries, data scientists, and operations research analysts, with a projected growth of at least 20 percent. And in cybersecurity—a market valued at over $200 billion globally in 2024—the demand for trained professionals consistently outpaces the available talent pool. In each of these sectors, the companies that rely on and benefit from college graduates are woefully underrepresented in the financing of university programs that train their workforce.

Fuller’s prescription is blunt: employers should manage their talent pipeline like the supply chain it is—investing in it, not merely drawing it down. The financial burdens currently borne by the higher education sector alone make it impossible to fulfill education’s promise to serve the public by training health care professionals. Colleges and universities require additional resources and active industry partnerships to increase their capacity and lessen the burden on students, families, and taxpayers. Greater philanthropy, state matching programs, workforce trusts, and payroll levies represent pieces of the solutions to the current chasm between workforce needs and higher education’s capacity to meet them.

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