When Sam Houston State University finishes its estimated $13 million-$14 million renovation to The Woodlands Center, nearly 25% more nursing students will be admitted per cohort, said Dr. Devon M. Berry, director of SHSU’s School of Nursing.
Once the expansion is completed in fall 2029, the school’s total enrollment will have grown by around 70%, increasing to a total headcount of around 720—up from 425.
“We’re just responding to the need in Texas for nurses,” Berry said. “For us to be … responsive to that, we wanted to find a way to increase our enrollment.”
Texas is projected to need 307,520 registered nurses by 2038, and a shortage in licensed vocational nurses is projected to begin in 2028, per the National Center for Health Workforce Analysis.
Two-minute impact
The renovation project will grow the square footage of teaching space at The Woodlands Center from around 9,600 square feet to around 35,600 square feet. The new square footage will be dedicated to two areas—new skills and simulations labs, as well as new classrooms.
“We were out of room for educating nurses,” Berry said. “So the university worked over the past couple years to design and develop a plan that would allow us to almost triple our educational space within the building, without increasing our footprint, but just by doing renovations to the existing space.”
One of the bottlenecks when it comes to growing enrollment is also the lack of clinical space, Berry said. SHSU can offset that bottleneck by providing simulation training to its nursing students—similar to the simulation training pilots receive.
“There are just not enough clinical placements out there in hospitals and other health care sites to accommodate all the training needs for students,” Berry said.
Once the renovation project is completed, the nursing school’s number of skills and simulation labs will have doubled, Berry said.
“We know from the research that simulation education … actually works,” Berry said. “We’re able to prepare the same level of quality nurses using a combination of simulation and clinical as we would be if we were doing just clinical experiences.”
Following the renovation of classrooms as part of the overall project, the university will also be able to decrease the ratio of faculty to students by about 70%, Berry said.
The conditions
Texas’ projected need for 307,520 registered nurses by 2038 is expected to create a shortage of over 21,000 nurses when compared with the projected supply of 286,210, according to the National Center for Health Workforce Analysis.
When it comes to licensed vocational nurses, the shortage is projected to begin in Texas in 2028, per the National Center for Health Workforce Analysis. By 2038, the projected supply is 48,480 LVNs compared to the projected demand of 67,890.
The projected shortages would give Texas a percent adequacy of 93% for RNs and 71% for LVNs, per the National Center for Health Workforce Analysis. Nationally, those figures are projected to be 97% and 70% for RNs and LVNs, respectively.
Some context
While a shortage is projected for Texas, it does not stem from a lack of interest in the field. When it comes to nursing school applications, since 2015, at least 25% of qualified students were not accepted into pre-licensure RN programs in Texas, according to the Texas Center for Nursing Workforce Studies.
According to the data, the number of seats for qualified students was less than the number of qualified applicants. In 2024, there were 26,305 seats, but 33,468 qualified applications—a difference of 7,163, per the Texas Center for Nursing Workforce Studies.
Meanwhile, enrollment in Bachelor of Science in nursing programs is also increasing, growing by 7.6% in 2025, per data from the American Association of Colleges of Nursing.
“Schools of nursing play an essential role in keeping individuals and communities healthy and thriving,” Dr. Deborah Trautman, AACN president and chief executive officer, said via news release. “Strategies to expand the nursing student population and address the ongoing nursing shortage are showing promising results.”
What else?
SHSU is also working to address the nursing shortage by increasing the number of nursing faculty through the Shared Nursing Academic Practice Partnership Initiative.
Berry said the Texas Board of Nursing regulates the ratio of faculty to students, so that can limit enrollment expansion if there isn’t enough faculty.
SNAPPI creates time buyouts, allowing a nurse’s 12-hour shift to be bought out so they can train students while still getting paid and working at their hospital. There is also a boot camp for prospective nurse faculty and a training cohort for students who work with a SNAPPI trainer.
“SNAPPI … shows tremendous potential to relieve the critical nursing shortage in Texas and demonstrates the power of partnerships between … institutions and employers,” Higher Education Commissioner Wynn Rosser said via news release.
Before you go
For fall 2026, SHSU’s School of Nursing had more than 500 applications, with 108 accepted for enrollment, per data from SHSU.
The nursing school’s enrollment will grow until fall 2027, when it hits 144 students accepted per semester.
In regard to SNAPPI, the university just completed the first year of its two-year $999,500 grant from the Texas Higher Education Coordination Board’s Nursing Innovation Program Grants, Berry said.
Berry said that this fall, the university plans to open its first three rural sites for SNAPPI. The next big goal is to find sustained funding for the program so that it can be scaled statewide.
“Our hope is … to continue to reduce this massive gap … in nursing faculty,” Berry said in a news release.
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Publisher: Houston – Community Impact Newspaper