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New Research: How Technology Infrastructure Is Shaping Nursing Education in 2026
May 27, 2026
Accreditation is hard enough when you're deep in the data every day, but when you must pull everything together from scattered systems, a variety of files, and a dozen different people, it can feel downright painstaking.
I know this firsthand. Before joining PeopleGrove, I spent years leading admissions marketing at a small private college. Part of that role meant sitting shoulder-to-shoulder with our institutional research team and faculty committees oftentimes when accreditation cycles rolled around, and I won't sugarcoat it: those stretches were rough. Late nights. Data living in different systems with no connection. Spreadsheets bouncing around in email chains. And always the low hum of collective anxiety about whether we'd ever be able to stitch it all into a coherent story.
We always got there. But it never once felt like something that was sustainable.
So, when I recently sat down with Sarah Dawson, Director of Clinical Placement at the University of Nebraska Medical Center, a lot of what she shared took me right back to those late nights and frantic spreadsheets. Sarah wasn't describing anything I hadn't felt myself, and that's exactly what made the conversation so striking.
That conversation was a preview of something bigger. Our new report, Trends in Nursing Education: 2026 Findings, is the third iteration of a survey we've conducted biennially since 2022, built in collaboration with leading nursing programs across the country. This year, we partnered with UNMC and gathered responses from nursing program administrators nationwide. It was designed to reflect the broader field, not just programs using any one platform.
And what struck me most when I looked across all of it wasn't any single data point. It was how consistently the findings mirrored the reality of people doing incredibly complex, high-stakes work, often with infrastructure that was never quite built for the scale they're now operating at.
Demand is outpacing capacity
Interest in nursing isn't slowing down, and programs are doing real work to keep up. At UNMC, Sarah mentioned they recently moved to twice-a-year admissions just to meet the growing volume of students coming through the door.
That pressure is showing up nationally, too. BSN enrollment grew by 4.9% in 2024, yet more than 80,000 qualified applicants were turned away because programs simply didn't have the capacity to take them.¹ Meanwhile, the U.S. is projected to face an 8% nursing shortage by 2028, and faculty vacancy rates sitting at 7.2% mean programs have limited room to grow even when the will is there.²
Sarah described it plainly: "We are seeing that growth… not just in one place, but across the entire state."
And growth doesn't stay neatly contained to enrollment numbers. It ripples through everything: clinical placements, student support, faculty workload, administrative coordination. Trying to manage all of that at once, without dropping anything, is genuinely hard work.
Managing complexity across systems
One of the clearest themes in the research is how programs are managing the technology infrastructure that supports clinical education, and for many, it is a lot to hold together.
Nearly every program is using technology in some capacity, but where things get complicated is in how those systems work together, or don't. Only 3% of programs report having a fully integrated system. The rest are navigating a mix of tools, processes, and workarounds that require constant human effort to bridge.
This isn't a new finding. We've seen this pattern consistently since 2022. Programs don’t lack tools. They lack the tools that actually talk to each other.
And to be clear, programs are making it work. Teams are coordinating across disconnected systems, filling gaps, and getting students through their clinical experiences. That kind of adaptability deserves real recognition.
But it isn't sustainable. As programs grow and staffing pressures mount, the question stops being does this work and starts being how long can we keep doing it this way. When information lives in multiple places, the risk of human error climbs, and more time gets spent chasing down data than using it. And when someone leaves, they often take critical institutional knowledge with them, knowledge about how the workarounds work, where things live, and who to call when something falls through the cracks. For the people and institutions doing this every single day, that's an exhausting and fragile way to operate.
Supporting compliance in a high-stakes environment
Compliance and accreditation aren't background noise in nursing education. They are central to everything programs do, and they carry a level of rigor that teams are navigating every single day.
For programs, that means managing documentation, placements, and simultaneously. And the complexity doesn't stay contained internally. Clinical partners are feeling it too, through increasingly demanding onboarding and documentation requirements that add yet another layer to an already full plate.
Sarah's description of earlier accreditation experiences will sound as painfully familiar to anyone who has been through it as it did to me: "It was looking through files… merging systems… making sure the data was not lost… that was a total nightmare."
What's encouraging is that more programs are starting to think differently about this. Rather than treating compliance as something to survive every few years, there's a growing recognition that building it into everyday operations is the only approach that is sustainable. That shift in thinking matters more than it might seem on the surface.
Turning clinical data into insight
There's real progress worth acknowledging here. Nearly 9 in 10 programs are now consistently collecting competency data, up steadily since 2022, and that's a meaningful step forward.
But collecting data and using it are two different things.
Right now, much of that data is doing its most important job: supporting accreditation requirements. That's essential and not something to minimize. But far fewer programs are regularly using it to spot performance trends or inform decisions at the program level. When competency data lives separately from placements, clinical hours, and evaluations, it's hard to ever see the full picture of where a student stands, let alone act on it before it becomes a problem. And that's the gap worth closing.
At UNMC, that shift is already happening. Through their connected clinical education infrastructure with CORE for Nursing, Sarah described what becomes possible: "It allows you to see how well the student is progressing… where we're lacking… and what steps we need to take."
That's what moving from data collection to genuine insight truly looks like in practice. And right now, it represents one of the most promising opportunities in nursing education.
Evolving the preceptor experience
What came through clearly in this year's research, and what Sarah reinforced, is that preceptors are deeply committed to this work. But they are navigating real demands within their own clinical environments.
The feedback isn't about student preparedness. It's about time and complexity. As Sarah put it: "They're at capacity… 'we don't have time… we don't have space'… it's the time and the onboarding."
That's worth sitting with. Because so much of the pressure that programs are feeling internally are the same ones their clinical partners are carrying. These aren't separate problems. They're connected.
And that's also where opportunity lives. Even modest improvements in how onboarding, communication, and documentation are handled can make a real difference in those relationships. When processes are streamlined and information is centralized, the administrative burden on preceptors goes down, and participation becomes something that feels sustainable.
Moving toward more connected approaches
Given everything programs are managing, it's not surprising that more than half are actively working to consolidate their systems, and many of those efforts are happening at the program level rather than waiting on institution-wide initiatives. Program leaders aren't sitting still. They're looking for ways to reduce fragmentation, improve visibility, and build workflows that their teams can sustain without burning out in the process.
That momentum is encouraging. And it's exactly the kind of shift this research was designed to support.
The full report goes much deeper. Longitudinal comparisons, additional data points, and context we couldn't cover in a single conversation are all in there. It was built to reflect the broader field honestly, not to advocate for any one platform or approach, and we think that shows in the findings.
If any of this resonated, we'd encourage you to read it. The people doing this work deserve research that takes their reality seriously.
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