Amid nurse shortage, a university rolls out the welcome mat for men

Summary

Stay up to date with our Up First newsletter sent every weekday morning.Men are largely missing out on one of the hottest professions in the U.S. right now: nursing.For registered nurses alone, the Labor Department projects there will be 189,000 job openings each year for the next decade. But only 1 in 8 nurses are men.There have long been efforts to rewrite the script around nursing — to push back on the idea that it's women's work. Now, the economy is helping, too. Related Story: NPR With diminishing opportunities in male-dominated industries like manufacturing and software engineering, nursing has emerged as a stable alternative and a solid pathway to a middle-class life.Nursing students at the University of Alabama at Birmingham are already experiencing what it's like to be in demand.Ethan Stinson will graduate next month and go straight into a job in the psychiatric unit at the university hospital."I feel like it's really easy to get a psych job if you're a nurse," he says. "They're hunting people all the time."His classmate Hatim Nasser, whose family had wanted him to study computer science, has a job lined up in the university hospital's heart and lung transplant intensive care unit.At a time when many of their peers are unsure of what's next, the students are happy their skills are in demand."We're grateful for it," Nasser says.A nursing school in the South leads the wayNo doubt, stereotypes about men in nursing still abound. But slowly, they're being eroded.At the University of Alabama at Birmingham, close to 1 in 6 nursing students are men, outpacing the national average. And nearly 1 in 5 faculty are men. In some specialties within the university hospital, male nurses are nearly as common as female nurses."I don't really feel like nursing isn't for men or anything like that. When I go to the hospital, I see guys all the time," says nursing student Amiri Saadiq, who's headed for a job in the bone marrow transplant intensive care unit.For years, the nursing...