The State of Nursing Education 2026

Hello. Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you so much for joining us today. I'm Ashley Spain. I'm Senior Vice President of Marketing at PeopleGrove. I'm joined today by my friend Sarah Dawson, who is the Director of Clinical Placement in the College of Nursing at the University of Nebraska Medical Center. Sarah and UNMC have been such incredible collaborators in the research we're going to share with you this afternoon, and we're here today to talk about the state of nursing education in 2026. So we're going to learn today about what's working, where this field is under pressure, and what data is showing us about how programs are managing the day-to-day clinical education and the competency assessments. Sarah is going to weigh in today and really just help us ground these findings. She's working in the field, and we'll share some best practices and what she's seeing firsthand at UNMC with peers. And I'm super excited, Sarah, to hear your perspective, and for our attendees to glean some best practices that they can then streamline and scale. Just a few quick notes. We have about forty-five minutes together today. We'll leave some time at the end for questions. If we don't get to all of the questions, we will absolutely follow up one-to-one afterwards. Please submit your questions through the Q&A tab. It is at the bottom of your screen. And then last note, all of our registrants from today will receive the recording from this session later this week. So I first will just take a quick moment to introduce myself in a little bit more detail. As I mentioned, I serve as the Senior Vice President for Marketing at PeopleGrove, and I wanted to share one of the things that I really love about my role here. It really sits at kind of the intersection between nursing education research and then the practical solutions that we have in our core platform that are built for programs just like yours in nursing. Before joining PeopleGrove about a year and a half ago, I spent the last fifteen or so years of my career all in higher education. Seven of those years I served on campus. I was leading admissions, marketing, and financial aid for a small private institution. So I'll just share that I have some real appreciation for the complexity you navigate every day. I have been in your shoes, and I'm really passionate about the work we're doing here to make all of it easier. I'll take just a moment. I'll hand it over to you, Sarah, to share a little bit about your background and introduce yourself. I am Sarah Dawson. I am the Director of Clinical Placement here at the University of Nebraska Medical Center for the College of Nursing. I have been in higher education for about twenty-five years, or since 2002, basically, and finally found my place here at the College of Nursing where I really have a passion for placing students, and I feel like I'm really making a difference. And with this system, it has made my life a lot easier. So I'm glad to be here. Fantastic. We're so happy to have you. Love that you've spent most of your professional career in higher education. That certainly speaks to my interest as well. Really quickly, I wanted to just start and give some context before we really dive into the findings about this research. It's the third iteration of this survey. We have conducted it biannually since 2022, and we started the first survey in collaboration with our friends at the University of Connecticut School of Nursing. And as I mentioned, this year we're super proud to have collaborated with UNMC and Sarah's team. The respondents of our survey represent a full range of program types, as you can see here, from pre-licensure BSN to DNP and dual programs. And then one thing I just wanted to call out — I think this is worth mentioning — the majority of the respondents of this survey are not in fact using CORE for Nursing. So if you are here and you are not yet using CORE for Nursing, you are among friends, and I think this research will really speak to you. I also just want to reiterate that our goal in conducting this research was really to just get a picture of the entire field now, not just our client base. So there's some intentionality in that. I also wanted to share just a little bit about the national context. Here you can see BSN enrollment is up almost five percent. That sounds like good news, and we're still projecting an eight percent nursing shortage by 2028. There were over eighty thousand qualified applicants that were turned away in 2024 alone, and it's not because they weren't ready. It was because the programs didn't have capacity. So that faculty vacancy rate at seven point two percent is really of note as well. And I did want to mention, I was reading this morning some new research that I also think is worth sharing. It didn't make it into my slides today because it's hot off the press as of this morning. But NCSBN put together some new findings on transition to practice. And really the research points to the core issue of being that students who are graduating from nursing programs are still not practice ready. And if you think about it, that's really the driving force behind what AACN Essentials and that framework was designed to do. But the number that really stuck with me was that twenty-five percent of new nurses are leaving their jobs in the first year. So if you think about that, it's really not just a workforce problem. It's, I think, in a way, signaling that there's a gap between education and practice. And it made me think of all of you who have registered for this webinar because it's exactly what you're building inside of your programs, and it's why the work you do matters so much — because it's making them practice ready. And so with that, I just wanted to share a little bit of context at the national level. And here I think what we're seeing is that the programs are being asked to do more with fewer faculty. Everyone's under more scrutiny in higher ed. And that's the environment that we're operating in. I will pause here just for a moment. Sarah, if you have any perspective to share on that, working with programs directly, and just really how you're experiencing some of the demands and that pressure on the ground. Well, the growth is continuing to grow. This last year, we started ourselves on twice-a-year admissions and are trying to have that capacity to accept more students while the programs grow along with the depletion of faculty. Because some faculty are part time, some faculty are full time, and just knowing what their capacity and workload are to handle the twice-a-year admissions. And I cover the full state of Nebraska, so that's not just one college at one place. It's throughout the whole entire state of Nebraska. And we are seeing that growth, and we are feeling that growth, because not only does that affect things — it's also the space and the capacity of the other folks that are on board with staff — with, like, student services, the clinical placements, and finding them spots along with competing with other colleges that may utilize our state as an online system. So we feel it already. It's a lot. It's absolutely a lot to manage, and certainly something that we're seeing across higher ed in general, but certainly for nursing programs alike. I do want to just dive in here. We've got a couple of major themes for today. The first is really centered around the infrastructure. If you think about it, the TLDR here — almost every program uses software to manage their clinical education, but what the data is showing is that most of those tools don't work together. So I'll dive in quickly and just give you a quick overview of what our research found. When we asked programs how they described their overall technology setup for clinical education, only three percent indicated that they have a fully integrated solution. Three percent. Fifty-two percent are running a mix of homegrown and external tools. Thirty-seven percent have multiple disconnected systems. Eight percent are still primarily manual, so thinking about spreadsheets and Post-it notes perhaps. But what that really means is almost ninety-seven percent of programs lack a fully connected infrastructure. So I think it's not really about a shortage of software or options or tools that could be used. It's really just the absence of a unified system where everything talks to one another, and it can really be the system of record. And I think, you know, really just sort of why that matters is centered around the risk — the compliance risk — there's friction with preceptors and students. And then it also means that you might be collecting data in different places, but it may not be actionable because you can't actually find it and/or analyze it in a way that makes it actionable. Sarah, I would love to hear your perspective on this. Seeing that ninety-seven percent figure, does that match what you're hearing from peers? I know you and I connected earlier this week and you had just come off of a couple of events where you were chatting with peers. I would love to know — does this line up with what you've been hearing in the market? It really does. I've talked to other colleges. Some are on that full system, and they've been lucky to have systems that talk to, you know, CORE, let's say. But primarily, they have been using manual tools. And in some cases, they have multiple employees doing one set of work where one system can do it all for you. And nobody knows what each other's doing or what they're in charge of. And that can be a problem if someone leaves or there's budget cuts and you have to have short staff and know where to look for things, because I'm sure a lot of us save things to our desktop rather than a shared drive or shared system. But that's the main issue I've heard — like, everything's done by hand from placing to tracking, not just the schedule itself. And that's kind of scary, because to not have one centralized system so somebody can look something up — and you're not knowing what the person next to you is doing — it's kind of striking and kind of scary. And of course, if they're using multiple systems and they're disconnected, it's like, how do you know which information's accurate when it comes time for accreditation? So these numbers are very — I feel that way as well. I questioned if we should put in a couple of different memes I've seen recently that display exactly that reaction that you gave. These numbers are — and I think it's really interesting. I think we'll talk about this in just a little bit, but just also the importance of thinking about this both at the institutional level and at the program level. And as you build toward accreditation and ensure that the work that you do on a daily basis is actionable in that way — but also thinking about ensuring that when you get to that accreditation cycle, you're not scrambling. So I think that's a really important point to consider, and I appreciate you sharing your perspective on that. I do want to look at just the folks who are using a vendor system and what specifically they're using it for. The data's here on the screen, but I'll share that the standout is really that site requirements are by far the most common use case. You're seeing eighty-five percent of those relying on a vendor for that. And then student evaluation and hours/competency tracking follow, both around forty to forty-five percent. I think what's really notable here is just that they're all compliance critical. And so as you think about compliance risk and accreditation documentation, everything has to be airtight. I think programs aren't turning to vendors to necessarily have a nice-to-have solution. It's really because the stakes are so high, and they need to be able to have that data all in one place specifically to manage those compliance-critical tasks. So I wanted to level set here related to consolidation, and we talked a little bit about this previously. If we level set on where we are currently with the data we've shared so far — programs are running mostly a mix of vendors and manual processes, homegrown solutions. That's kind of where it is today. And then here you see fifty-seven percent are actively working to consolidate. So a majority are actively looking to consolidate, and we've seen across the higher education industry the reasons in which there's a need to consolidate. And some of it's cost driven, but a lot of it is data driven. Of that group of folks who are looking to consolidate, forty-eight percent are driving it at the program level. They're not just waiting on the institution to consolidate. And Sarah, when you and I talked previously, you shared a little bit about UNMC's consolidation journey — really the evolution from doing it at the institutional level, but then also the importance of doing it at the program level. I'd love to just hear a little bit more from you on that and share that level of detail with our attendees. Yes. So it started at the institution level, because a lot of our colleges share what we call the affiliation agreements — the contracts that allow our students to go to the different sites. And then branching off from that, they saw our system here that I felt could be useful for not only the undergrad component, because we were using a different vendor for the professional grads. And one was still on paper. One was still on this one system that just did not function at an easy rate. And so diving into it because I'm tech savvy, it was feasible to bring it and onboard it for not only our professional grad and our undergrad, and seeing all the different aspects that it can do for us — not having to aggregate data, no risk of human error. It's all consolidated in one spot. So if I need to flip and run a report for undergrad, I can flip back and run a report for professional grad and kind of put that data together and maybe have someone just double-check it that the numbers are right. But it's better than trying to find all the information in different places, especially when you have five divisions of our college where everybody does something different. So it kind of just takes all that information and how people interpret the information and has it in one resourceful place that is easier to find, easier to understand, and produces results that we need, especially when accreditation's coming up. Yeah. Absolutely. You definitely are leveraging a lot of the best practices that we recommend and using the tools in the way in which they were intended for your nursing program. And I would say, based on everything that we've shared so far, the appetite for this unified system of record is the clearest thing in this entire dataset of this research. And the good news is we can help with that. The second major theme that we were seeing in this research was really centered around compliance, and it shows up in two places in the data that I just wanted to call out today. The first is around the burden that programs are carrying internally. So Sarah just spoke to that — the time and the risk of managing all of that documentation and data across disconnected systems. And the second is really around the burden of what it is doing to the relationships with the clinical partners and the sites and the preceptors. So if we dig in here, a quarter of programs are saying that they're managing documentation across multiple systems with a significant placement burden. And twenty-three percent are reporting that the clinical sites themselves find compliance requirements difficult to manage. And I would say, just when your systems aren't connected, you know, it's really hard to maintain that accreditation evidence. You're constantly assembling it right before the cycle, right before the review. All of it feels under pressure, which brings me to this photo. That is an actual photo of me during my last accreditation season when I was on campus. Total chaos leading up to it. It was a struggle to pull all of the data from different places. Sometimes it was in a spreadsheet on someone's desktop. Sometimes it was in a system that no one knew how to get to the right report from. None of the formats would match. None of the outputs were the same. And I think back to that moment and the way I felt, and I think if I had a platform like CORE, so much of that scrambling just would have probably been just a report that I ran from the system. So I'm interested in your thoughts, Sarah, on that. I know we talked about your accreditation cycle with CCNE coming up in 2028. Just generally, how are you feeling about that? I am feeling a little more prepared. I mean, it's been a long time since I've had to go through an accreditation process, especially at this level. But knowing that one piece of the information is knowing where our students are going and their preceptor information — all that's already in our system for all of our College of Nursing programs. I remember my first accreditation readiness experience, and that was looking through hard files. It was looking in these systems that we had to merge from one system to the other, making sure the data was not lost, then having to refer back to hard papers so that we could have these reports ready somehow that the accreditation people could review themselves. And that was a total nightmare and total mess. But with this, it's like, okay. I already have checkbox A. They're going to look for preceptors. They're going to look at whether our students are getting a well-rounded educational experience at all these different sites. So I'm getting excited, but yet still nervous about having it come up. So yeah. I'm already preparing now. That's what's so interesting — how early the preparation period starts, and all of the day-to-day work that all of you are doing. It's all in preparation for that next cycle. And I'm so glad to hear you're feeling a bit better about that. I think one of the interesting things that kind of tags on to this — and thinking about all of the things that are necessary as it relates to tracking — is centered around this theme of competency tracking. And I think competency tracking in nursing has made so much measurable progress, but is also facing some really, I would say, nuanced challenges. And so I think now it's a question of whether or not our nursing programs can move from that data collection point to program improvement. And so looking into the data here, competency tracking over time — over this biannual survey over the last four years — has really nearly become universal. Adoption, you can see here, has climbed really steadily over the last four years, and now it's close to about ninety percent. So programs are tracking, but I think the more interesting question is what they're doing with this data. And the primary use is accreditation mapping. That makes a ton of sense, but only about fifteen percent of the programs are reviewing the outcomes and the performance dashboards. And so my takeaway from this is the data exists, but it's not necessarily actionable, and I think that's a gap we can certainly help close. It's something we've partnered with you on, Sarah. What does this look like for UNMC? We're getting excited. Just the fact — I've watched this part of CORE kind of grow over the last year. And I came back to explain it to my programs like, look. You can just build the competencies and the outcomes and the sub-objectives that our students are trying to strive for. And it allows you not only to see how well the student is progressing through the program, it allows you to know which classes are doing better, which faculty may be teaching a certain subject a little bit better that the students are understanding, and how it all streamlines. It all does eventually go back to the accreditation mapping because it takes that information that you build in whatever platform you use for your education side of things. But this system will take it — your clinical experience outcomes, your educational work outcomes. And so we're getting excited because just knowing that it shows you the percentages where we're striving, where we're lacking, what steps we may need to take to get to the level that we want and need to be at. So I'm really excited about this feature of CORE. That's fantastic. I am so happy to hear you're excited about it, and certainly something that we're seeing as a trend across nursing programs. We as a company have invested a lot in improving this area of our business, and I'm super excited that you are finding it useful early on and certainly happy to share any of those details with anyone interested afterwards. I do want to talk a little bit about something that I think we all care a lot about, which is the preceptor experience and really this kind of theme around the preceptor challenge and the way in which I think it could open opportunity. It's really around preceptors — there being a shortage, not enough, and not enough time. That's certainly true. But the data here for this year I think is a little bit more nuanced as it relates to the top concerns coming from our preceptors. You can see here the two top concerns when they were asked are time constraints and onboarding complexity. Both of those came in around thirty-five percent. And then student preparedness. This is what surprised me, because I think this is often the assumption for being the top reason. Student preparedness actually ranked last. So important distinction there. I think the feedback is pointing more to the operational gap that we've been talking about, not necessarily as much of an academic gap. The preceptors aren't necessarily saying your students aren't ready. They're saying this is too complicated. It's taking too much of my time. This is so hard. Those types of things. And then if you layer in this data that I included at the bottom — the competition for available preceptors has nearly doubled since 2022. The stakes just keep getting higher. So programs that make it easier for their preceptors to work with them are going to win those relationships. And that's where I think this operational piece and the infrastructure can really become a strategic advantage for institutions. Sarah, I'm really interested in your work with clinical partners and with preceptors at UNMC. Does this ring true? How does your experience differ? It does ring true just because you have students that may not be at our college who are trying to find preceptors themselves, and they do it a little bit differently than we have our preceptors that we're trying to find for our students. And it's sometimes like they're at capacity, especially if you need someone in a certain area to be precepted in. One of our divisions has, like, a forum where they have to negotiate their spots ahead of time and then adjust. And then we have, like, our rural areas, which are sometimes a little bit harder because the drive is further. And so that puts a lot of pressure on the preceptors, which is the onboarding. A lot of them — I've gotten excuses when we try to find the smaller preceptors or the smaller sites. The preceptors are like, no. We don't have space, we don't have capacity, we don't have time. And though our evaluation process is clear because we prepare them with a handbook that shows them what to expect in the evaluation — we give them notes on what our students should know by the time those evaluations come — it's just, I think, the time in it. I have to agree with this. It's the time and the onboarding, because a lot of times, depending on what healthcare system you use, you have to input everything — the request in manually — and then it's getting on top of the students to input that information in, and then they can get onboarded and hopefully start on time for their clinical rotations. Yeah. I think that certainly validates some of the responses to the research we have here today, and I think it's certainly an area where we can help make that onboarding — and really the time that it takes in the system — shorter and easier, and just make the entire preceptor experience far more favorable. I think if we bring it all together, just to kind of tie off on the initial findings of this research — and I'll pause for a moment before I go into takeaways because I will tell you that this is just the tip of the iceberg. There's a lot more here, and there's a lot more that we could dive into, and we certainly will over time. And especially we'll be publishing the full research report, and you'll gain access to that as well. But I wanted to just highlight some of the main findings today. And if you think about the takeaways that we have here — the capacity problem is also a systems problem. And I think, you know, even if you were to hire additional staff, which always comes back to budget, I really don't think you can hire your way out of this fragmented infrastructure. Ninety-seven percent of programs are running tools that don't talk to each other, and that friction is just kind of showing up everywhere, I think. As I mentioned earlier, when the documentation and the data is fragmented, it instills compliance risk that I think just unfortunately can't be justified today. And then as we are collecting competency data, and we're doing a better job of that over time, it's just not being acted on. And then lastly, as you saw in the data and as Sarah just validated, the preceptors are telling all of us loud and clear that they need operational relief. So really, when I think about the takeaways that this data is pointing to, it's not five separate problems. It's really the same problem that's showing up in five different places. I'm really interested, Sarah. We have moved through a lot of data today, and you've been great about sharing your perspective throughout. But I wanted to just take a moment away from each of the individual findings we have in this research report, and also just for you to share what it looks like — what your picture looks like as a whole — what really drew you and the team at UNMC to collaborate with us at PeopleGrove on the research, what did you find in the data that resonated, and really as you think about yourself and the way you work with your nursing programs, but then also so many other nursing program administrators on the call today — what is the most important thing you want them to take away from this? Well, the part on the research is that it's just real. It's happening. The data's not lying about it. I mean, I've experienced it myself, talking to other entities with other staff members, and a lot of them were still doing it all by hand. And that frightened me. And I thought, well, what if somebody leaves? What if somebody's out sick? Like, where would you know to pick up those pieces to keep the flow going? And at least before I came in as the director, I knew where everything was at. I could go and report back the information that someone was asking for because I had one centralized system. And it's scary. Like, the times are changing — functioning electronically is where everybody's kind of moving to, because if you have it all in one place, you can just send the compliance information over to that hospital entity. You don't need to basically fax something over or email it. It just streamlines over to that system — download a packet, basically. So the findings — they've just confirmed whatever I expected in this field. It's a lot, just because change is hard for some people. And with this system, I have made it — they heard me, and they listened to what I needed up front, not just saying go ahead and build it for me, and then it'd be completely totally wrong. So knowing upfront and working together and saying this is my expectations, this is how I want it, this is how I want it to function — that has made a real big difference for making my system work for me, even though we're all on the same basic level. Some of our sister universities with the college of nursing differentiate because we have different requirements. We have different processes. But having that baseline — the thing I think that most surprised me in the data is just the time constraint and the onboarding, and I believe that could be totally fixed if it's just centralized in that one system, because when they need it, you have it. It's already validated. It's there. And it's an easy system. I think that's what you need to really hear. It's an easy system to learn, though I know everybody kind of attaches themselves to something. But I had to change, and I had to grow really fast with our system. And they walked alongside me every step of the way to make sure that it was running seamlessly in the way I needed and in how I needed to achieve the goals that my programs needed, in order for our students to continue to grow, continue to be placed easier, and function at full capacity — even though that gap is growing — and it's not that we're turning anybody away, but also to relieve some of the faculty burden that was happening before with doing everything administratively: finding vaccines, as an example — everything just in one place, and that data's there. That's super helpful. I appreciate those insights. I think one of the things that you said that we haven't touched on, but I think is relevant to the conversation, is that you're sharing that it's easy to use. The CORE platform is easy to learn. You're speaking to, I think, the hesitancy that exists in all of us to adopt a new tool. You immediately think like, oh, I have to learn this new thing, and it's going to be a challenge, and I don't have time to learn and train the team. And I appreciate you sharing that in your experience it's easy to learn and it's easy to use. And that's a trend we hear with our clients. And I think it matters because as we think about the nursing student experience, what we really want to think about as it relates to consolidation is one continued journey, one connected system, one brand that they experience, one login that they have to remember — it just makes everything easier and more connected across the board. And I will tell you, we've positioned it today as it relates to the student and preceptor experience, but the reality is what you're sharing is that from an admin experience, there's benefit too. It's one login. It's one brand experience. It's all in one place. And as an example, like, we have to have our preceptor credential form. And since we don't want to burden our preceptors too much as well, we just send them a link that directly opens that form. They fill it out and set the expiration date. They get another email, just hit the link, update that information — their credential or their licensure — and they don't even have to log in. And some things are like that. We're able to just shoot them an email. They click the link. That's it. I mean, the same thing with the evaluations. They don't even have to log in themselves and try to navigate. Yeah. It's already sent to them. That's fantastic. I so appreciate you just sharing another level of detail on that. It's certainly, I think, just a unique differentiator that we hear a lot about, and so it's nice to have that reinforced firsthand. We have covered a lot today. We've talked about the infrastructure gap. We've talked about compliance risk, preceptor friction, and competency data that sits unused perhaps. And I'll share, this is exactly what CORE for Nursing was built to solve. And so I'm going to walk you through how we help programs like yours and like Sarah's. First up, you're going to see a question pop up on the screen. I would love for you to take just a moment to respond. I will share with you that we have a really talented team of experts who would love to just spend a little bit of time with you, sharing so many of the insights that they see as they're working with so many nursing programs across the nation, and just to connect with you one-to-one, dig into your very specific use case, and show exactly how CORE could be configured for your nursing program. While you take some time to respond to that, I'll just share a little bit more about CORE for Nursing. It's really a connected clinical education ecosystem, and there are three sort of pieces that work together. The first is CORE ELMS, and that handles really the full clinical placement lifecycle. So it handles site management, preceptor tracking, scheduling compliance, hours tracking, evaluations — all of that in one place, just as Sarah mentioned. And so it really takes you away from those spreadsheets and having to re-enter data across multiple systems and puts it all in one place that you can then report out on for accreditation purposes. The second is really CORE CompMS, and we talked about this with the competency tracking. This connects your curriculum map to your competency assessments. It connects the accreditation frameworks and all of your clinical performance data. And so you can get a much fuller view of the student journey in one place and then use that data to actually improve your program. So if you think about things like program effectiveness and ensuring that ties back to the curriculum that was developed, it will very much help you improve your program, improve your experience, and it's not just to satisfy your accreditors, but certainly will help in that reporting. And then lastly, CORE MyPrep. This gives students a really structured way to kind of build and present their clinical portfolio with their evidence, which they can then take to employers as they're interviewing, and then to those licensure bodies, and they can really have a great way to showcase that real-world experience that they received. So I'll note as well, you've heard from Sarah — CORE for Nursing was certainly designed and built for nursing programs as a baseline, but we know that all nursing programs are not the same. And so I think it's important to note that it's also configurable. I think one of the things that I've been most proud of in collaborating with a lot of our client partners is really how much we can help large nursing programs. It doesn't really matter the size, but there are ways in which we can configure the system that will be specific to your nursing program needs and the way in which you handle scheduling and competency tracking. Sarah, anything to add to that? One thing I'd like to add is that I like your Client Success Manager — they walk with you every step of the way. So even after you get stuff built and you want to change something, add something, or sometimes you're just overloaded and you need something merged and uploaded in there, they will do it for you. And that's kind of the nice part. It's not like it's built and it's done. You don't have to call or leave an email to get a message within twenty-four to forty-eight hours. They respond right back, and they follow up letting you know it's completed, and they show you how to work and use that piece that you needed to change or configure differently. So I've really appreciated that. Sarah, shout out to our CS team. You are so right. Our Client Success team is fantastic here, and they really share in the mission-driven work you all are doing in nursing programs to help graduate career-ready nursing students. And I so appreciate that you brought that up, because it's certainly something that a lot of our clients appreciate — just having someone who can quickly share the best way to do this in the system, or can help you do it in the system if you hit a roadblock — and they're really just a phone call away and certainly ready to help our customers and our clients whenever they need it. I think this is a really important point you bring up. Alright. We have covered a lot of ground today. I really appreciate everyone staying with us. I think we've got just a moment or two for some of the questions that we can get through in the chat. And then, as I mentioned, if we do not get to answer your question, we will follow up afterwards one-to-one with you. So if you have a question here, please put it in the chat. I do have one question here in the chat. What is driving programs to consolidate at the program level rather than waiting on IT? I can take that, Sarah. And then if you want to weigh in, I think you certainly have some firsthand experience on what would drive a program to consolidate at the program level. I would say in most cases what I see is it's just the urgency factor. It's the accreditation timelines. They oftentimes will not allow for us to wait on those institutional procurement cycles and IT programs that can sometimes just lengthen the process. And so I think, you know, deans and program directors are really just trying to solve the challenge that they have at hand right now, and the most effective way to do that is at the program level. Sarah, what would you add to that? I agree with that. IT's timeline is different from what the colleges — or the college of nursing or any type of program out there that utilizes a system to merge over or consolidate — need. Because like Ashley said, their timeline is completely different from our urgency, where we need to get it done and we need to get it done now. We can't wait until you have time to do it for us. So with the push and support of whoever your higher administrators are, you're able to consolidate and combine everything that you need — all that information — versus waiting to have IT push it out or recommend this. And also, sometimes it's a cost factor, depending on — you know, everyone's seeing budget cuts here and there — and sometimes it's like, okay. We're going to make this a whole system for everybody at the university level or the college level, depending on however your entity or institution plays out. So that's the push behind why sometimes the universities push it faster and harder than just suggesting it to IT to get it done. That's great. I do have one more question in the chat that I think we have time for that I think is for you, Sarah — and you spoke to it a little bit. But thinking through it — it's a question around stakeholder buy-in and whether you had additional stakeholders within the institution that you had to get on board, or did you have a team of folks who all sort of agreed that this was the best path forward? Just talk about stakeholder buy-in. For us, it was at a university level, and there was quite a bit of hesitation with the other colleges. But seeing the functionalities of how it works — and yes, like, my system may be different from the College of Medicine or the College of Allied Health or the College of Public Health — but again, it's built to meet their needs and my needs differently. One thing they all share in common is that we use it for our contracts and our agreements, because a lot of us share those sites, preceptors, whatever the case may be, to be able to go to those sites. That was kind of like the foot in the door: hey, instead of sending tons of emails and flooding your inbox with that, you can just go into the system and look and see if it's done. So one, you don't have to waste your time. And two, you're not sending an email hoping someone responds to see if they're working on that contract or not. Super smart. Yep. I think that's common. I remember from my days on campus, just the push and pull between programs, between program directors — and everyone's mission and intent is good. Everyone wants to further advance their program, but seeing that it can be configured to different program use cases certainly does help with that stakeholder buy-in, so I appreciate you sharing that as well. I know we are quickly approaching time. I do want to thank everyone who joined us today, especially you, Sarah. Thank you so much for bringing your practitioner perspective and really, I think, making this data a lot more meaningful. Thank you so much for your time. No problem. We did include on the slide here a full 2026 Trends in Nursing Education report that's going to be published and available next week. So you've got the preview today, and the report next week is going to include everything we walked through today plus the complete methodology, comparisons, and that full national workforce context as well. And so if you're building a case internally, this is certainly something concrete that you can work with. I would certainly encourage you to do so. And then if you want to learn more about CORE for Nursing or any of the individual components of it, you can reach out at any time to [email protected]. We would love to continue the conversation. Thank you, everyone. I hope you have a wonderful day. You too. Bye. Bye.