How Perkins Leadership Grants Can Build Your Nurse Faculty Pipeline

Nursing programs across the country routinely turn away qualified applicants not for lack of demand, but for a nurse educator shortage. The 2025 full-time nurse faculty vacancy rate was 7.2 percent, and clinical placements only compound the squeeze. The waitlist is rarely the bottleneck; the instructor is.

In October 2026, Del Mar College in Corpus Christi offered a worked example of a different fix. The college landed a $206,000 Perkins Leadership Grant and aimed it at faculty mentorship, onboarding and retention rather than student aid, with the goal of opening 30 to 40 new RN seats by Fall 2027.

That choice, spending federal CTE money on the people who teach, reframes capacity as a nurse faculty retention problem first and a recruitment problem second.

What Perkins Leadership Money Can Pay for in a Nursing Program

The 10 Percent Pool

Up to 10 percent of each state's Perkins V allocation is set aside as state leadership funds.¹ The state eligible agency holds this money and directs it; it is not passed straight through to colleges by formula.¹ Perkins V, the federal Strengthening Career and Technical Education for the 21st Century Act, funds career and technical education (CTE). A two-year RN program fits that definition because it prepares students for a licensed, high-demand occupation. That is why community college nursing faculty, often targeted by nursing faculty shortage solutions, can count as CTE educators.

The Educator Recruitment and Retention Category

U.S. Department of Education guidance treats recruiting, preparing and retaining CTE educators as a required use of leadership funds.³ Texas turns that requirement into a competitive grant category, "Recruitment and Retention of CTE Educators in Postsecondary Education." In the 2025-2026 cycle, the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board opened it to two-year public colleges. For a nursing department, fundable lines typically look like this:

• Nurse Educator Mentoring: stipends or release time for experienced faculty who coach new hires, where the state solicitation allows it.
• Onboarding: structured orientation for clinicians moving into teaching.
• Professional development: conferences, certification prep and teaching workshops.
• Instructional preparation: training in curriculum design, test construction and clinical supervision.

Federal guidance also lists other allowable examples: teacher residencies, incentives for industry experts to teach, childcare or transportation support, and salary supplements for hard-to-staff positions.³

What the Grant Is Not

This is institutional money. Federal guidance does permit service-linked scholarships or loan forgiveness for educators, with one example tying forgiveness to four years of service at an underserved school.³ Those benefits flow through a funded project, though, not an open application. The grant is not a student scholarship, a personal tuition benefit or a general operating subsidy.

Funds must supplement, not supplant, nonfederal CTE spending.² You cannot use them to replace costs your college would otherwise cover. Every dollar must also target CTE personnel, so the money does not stretch to general education faculty.³

Before drafting a proposal, consult Nursing Education Grant Writing and read your own state agency's solicitation. Each state decides which activities and applicants it will fund.

Can an Individual Nurse or MSN Student Apply Directly?

No. Perkins Leadership grants are awarded to institutions, consortia, and state agencies, not to individual nurses or MSN students.¹ A nurse educator graduate student has no direct claim on the funds, but can benefit indirectly through a college's faculty development, mentoring, or adjunct-to-faculty pathway built to ease the nurse educator shortage.

Why the direct route is closed

Federal Perkins V state grant awards list eligible applicants as states and territories,² and U.S. Department of Education FY 2026 guidance funds those state agencies rather than individuals.¹ Leadership dollars are administered by the state, which may run competitions or subawards under its approved state plan.¹ Pennsylvania limits its leadership activities grants to secondary CTE centers and postsecondary institutions,³ and Texas runs its competition among public two-year institutions. Students show up as beneficiaries, not as applicants.¹

What an MSN nurse educator can do instead

• Ask the nursing or CTE dean: Find out whether the college has Perkins-funded mentorship, onboarding, or adjunct development slots you can join.
• Apply for roles carrying support: Position yourself for a clinical nurse educator or adjunct role that includes mentoring and professional development under a Perkins grant.
• Use individual aid where it fits: The Nurse Faculty Loan Program is a separate, student-facing option for graduate nursing students preparing to become nurse educators, while Perkins assistance remains institution-administered.

The fine print on student help

Some states allow colleges to use Perkins funds for limited direct assistance to students, but payments go to the institution and are not disbursed to students directly. Washington's 2026 block grant guidelines illustrate the guardrails: at least half-time enrollment in a professional-technical program, FAFSA completion, Pell eligibility, special-population status, a 2.0 cumulative GPA, and an annual application, with funds limited to tuition and fees after other aid is exhausted.⁴ That is a narrow institutional aid lane, not a nurse educator fellowship application.

How Del Mar College Is Wiring Mentorship Into Capacity

Most nursing programs try to buy capacity by recruiting new instructors. Del Mar College is trying to build it by keeping and developing the instructors it already hires, and that choice shapes its entire Perkins Leadership plan.

Where the Award Sits in the 2026 Texas Round

Gov. Greg Abbott announced roughly $3.7 million in Perkins Leadership Grants for the 2026-2027 cycle.¹ The money went to 13 Texas public two-year institutions across three funding categories. Del Mar, in Corpus Christi, received $206,000 in the Recruitment and Retention of CTE Educators in Postsecondary Education category. Only six awards went to that category (four colleges and two college districts), totaling about $1.7 million.

The college's Viking News reported on October 20, 2026 that Del Mar is aiming the funds at postsecondary nursing faculty. The goals are to ease the shortage of qualified nursing educators and widen access to high-demand nursing credentials in South Texas, strengthening the nursing workforce pipeline.

The baseline matters. Roughly 172 nursing students graduated from Del Mar in 2024-2025, across a ladder that runs from entry-level preparation to a bachelor's pathway. Any growth has to come from that existing faculty base.

The Faculty-Side Levers

Instead of funding a single hire, the project builds a faculty development model with connected parts:

• Mentor training: Experienced faculty learn to coach newer colleagues, not just supervise them.
• Structured mentorship: New faculty receive assigned, ongoing support instead of informal hallway advice.
• Onboarding: A defined entry process for clinicians moving into academic roles.
• Instructional preparation: Teaching skills that clinical expertise alone does not supply, building nurse educator competencies.
• Continuous evaluation: Ongoing review so the model can be refined and eventually adopted by other Texas institutions.

Expanded professional development runs alongside these pieces. It gives established faculty a reason to stay as well as a way to grow.

The Targets That Tie It Together

The goals work like a capacity equation:

• At least 90% full-time nursing faculty retention.
• Higher participation in professional development.
• 30 to 40 additional nursing student seats by Fall 2027.
• A 90% retention and completion rate held at the RN program's exit level.

That last target is the guardrail. Adding seats is easy if you accept more attrition. Del Mar is committing to grow enrollment without letting student outcomes slide.

If you are drafting your own proposal, copy the logic. Faculty retention metrics become your evidence that new student seats are sustainable, and that is the argument a reviewer in this category is looking for in a nursing school growth plan.

Del Mar's Grant by the Numbers: Faculty in, Seats Out

Read these figures as a chain of cause and effect. Faculty retention is the input: keep at least 90% of full-time nursing faculty through mentorship, onboarding and professional development. The output is 30-40 more RN student seats by Fall 2027, with exit-level retention and completion held at 90%.

Building a Grow-Your-Own Nurse Educator Pipeline, Step by Step

Where will your next five nursing instructors come from? For most programs the honest answer is that they are already on your clinical units or teaching one course a term as adjuncts. A grow-your-own pipeline means naming those people early and moving them through a defined sequence instead of hoping someone applies when a line opens.

1. Identify and recruit before the vacancy

• Action: Audit your adjunct roster, preceptors and unit educators each spring and name the clinicians who have already said yes to teaching something.
• Metric: Number of identified candidates who accept a defined entry role (adjunct clinical instructor, skills lab coordinator, simulation facilitator) within 12 months.
• Perkins fit: Recruitment of CTE educators, including stipends and release time attached to that entry role.

2. Train the mentors before you pair anyone

Mentor capacity is not automatic. In a 2025 quasi-experimental study of 39 nursing faculty in Arizona, a structured educational session raised willingness to mentor from a mean of 43.00 to 45.26 (p = 0.009).¹ That study measured willingness, not new-faculty turnover, so treat it as evidence that mentor readiness is trainable rather than proof of a retention effect.

• Metric: Share of assigned mentors completing training, plus pre- and post-session willingness scores.
• Perkins fit: Professional development.

3. Onboard across 12 months, not one week

A 2025 systematic review of nine mostly U.S. studies on New Nurse Faculty with two- to three-year follow-up recommended formal mentoring with written boundaries and guidelines, and onboarding that begins before the start date and is tailored to the individual.² Groth and colleagues, the only one of four onboarding studies in that review to measure satisfaction, retention and perceived effectiveness, reported program ratings of 4.6 out of 5 from novices and 4.2 from mentors.² A 2024 quality improvement project found an eight-week structured onboarding and mentorship sequence raised perceived competence but did not change job satisfaction, which argues for a year-long arc rather than a single term.³ A 2026 scoping review of 23 studies published between 2000 and 2024 found gains in satisfaction, competence and retention were real but localized, with small samples and inconsistent measures.⁴

• Metric: Full-time faculty retention at 12 and 24 months. Del Mar's 90% target is a defensible benchmark to write into your own proposal.

4. Build instructional preparation, not just orientation

The teachable skills are curriculum mapping for ngn, test item writing, simulation debriefing and clinical evaluation. Jeffers and Mariani reported significantly higher intent to stay and career satisfaction among mentored faculty (t = 4.83, p < .001; intent-to-stay mean 97.94).²

• Metric: Percentage of novice faculty completing a stated annual professional development hour target.

5. Use MSN education students as your feeder

MSN nurse educator students need msn nurse educator practicum hours and teaching experience. Host them, then hire them as clinical instructors. That pairing turns a graduate requirement into your recruitment funnel.

From Faculty Hires to Clinical and Classroom Seats

A nursing seat is not a desk in a lecture hall. It is a clinical rotation slot with a qualified instructor attached to it, a contracted facility willing to host that group, and a workload line in somebody's faculty assignment. That is why faculty money converts into enrollment capacity: hire and keep instructors, and you can run more clinical sections; run more sections, and admissions can raise the class size without breaking the ratios.

What actually caps the number

Three limits decide how far a program can stretch:

• Board of nursing ratios. Texas Board of Nursing Rules 214.10 and 215.10 set clinical faculty-to-student ratios for direct patient care.¹ With faculty alone, the cap is 10 students, and patient safety or facility policy can push it lower. With preceptors sharing instruction the cap is 12, with preceptors as sole instruction it is 24, and a professional program using a clinical teaching assistant may cover 15 students with one faculty member plus that assistant. Skills and simulation labs are governed by school policy, not these rules.
• Placement availability. In the 2023-2024 clinical training data, 64.8% of Texas prelicensure programs struggled to find clinical sites and 23.9% turned away qualified applicants for lack of placements.² Among facilities reporting limits, 47.7% cited a shortage of preceptors and 39.0% cited clinical space.²
• Accreditation and approval review. CCNE and ACEN expect faculty qualifications and resources to match enrollment, and TBON ties approved enrollment to qualified faculty, facilities and clinical availability. Programs without national accreditation proposing a headcount increase of 25% or more in one academic year need to follow the nursing program approval process.³

Doing the capacity math

Multiply clinical faculty FTE by the ratio your supervision model allows, then by the number of sections each person carries per term. Del Mar's target of 30 to 40 added seats by Fall 2027 translates into roughly three to four more faculty-led clinical groups of 10, or two to three groups under a clinical teaching assistant model at 15. Run that against your contracted site hours before you promise admissions anything.

Guarding against quality dilution

This is why the seat goal includes a 90% retention and completion floor at the RN program's exit level. Capacity gains that erode completion are not gains. Pair any expansion with cohort-level tracking, early-alert review each term, and a rule that new sections only open when a mentored, prepared instructor is in place to teach them, a move that directly supports nurse faculty retention.

Budget Lines, Metrics and Evaluation Reporting

A faculty retention project and a seat-expansion project draw on different budget logic: one spends on the people already teaching, the other on the infrastructure that lets them teach more. A Perkins Leadership proposal usually has to fund both at once, which makes clean budget categories and measurable targets essential before the state agency will approve the award.

Likely budget categories

For a faculty-development project built on the Del Mar model, expect your budget narrative to group costs along these lines:

• Mentor stipends: paying experienced faculty to mentor new hires through onboarding and the first teaching year.
• Training and certification: instructor-preparation coursework, clinical-teaching certificates, and continuing education.
• Release time: buying down a portion of a senior faculty member's clinical or teaching load to run mentorship or curriculum work.
• Onboarding materials and evaluation costs: structured orientation packets, instructional-design support, and the data collection that your reporting depends on.

Allowable costs are not uniform. Texas requires every State Leadership Grant to tie spending to at least one Perkins V accountability measure, and each state agency's request for applications (RFA) defines what it will and will not reimburse. Confirm the categories against your own RFA before you build the spreadsheet.

Metrics worth modeling

Del Mar's publicly stated goals give you a workable target set: at least 90% full-time nursing faculty retention, increased participation in professional development, 30 to 40 additional student seats by Fall 2027, and a 90% retention and completion rate at the registered nurse program's exit level. Those four measures cover inputs (faculty and development), capacity (seats), and quality (exit-level outcomes), which is the balance reviewers look for.

Continuous evaluation

Build the evaluation cycle into the proposal, not after it. Capture a baseline at award start, run a mid-year check to catch drift in retention or enrollment, and file an annual report to the state agency documenting progress against each target. Any mid-cycle budget change typically needs agency approval, so flag that in your internal calendar.

State structures vary in scale. Kentucky's professional-development grants have funded instructor training at roughly $1,500 per instructor, a narrower line than a full Texas Leadership award, but a useful reference if your project is scoped to professional development alone rather than seat expansion.

Related Articles

Perkins, Title VIII, NFLP and DOL Grants: Which Fits Whom

Perkins Leadership, Title VIII NEPQR and DOL Nursing Expansion grants all go to institutions or partnerships, while the Nurse Faculty Loan Program funds schools so they can lend to graduate students headed for faculty roles. Read each row by who writes the application and who ends up holding the benefit. The takeaway: institutions pair Perkins with Title VIII, and individual MSN students look to NFLP and similar loan or scholarship routes.

Replication Checklist: Taking This Model to Your Own Program

Use this list to move from interest to a fundable faculty pilot. Perkins processes and priorities vary by state and by cycle, so verify every item against your state's current request for applications (RFA) before you plan.

1. Find your state's Perkins administrator and Leadership grant contact

   Owner: grants office or CTE dean. When: now, before the cycle opens. Administrators differ by state. In Texas it is the Higher Education Coordinating Board, and only public two-year community and technical colleges are eligible.
2. Confirm the current application window

   Owner: grants office. When: as soon as the RFA posts. Deadlines are not national. Pennsylvania's 2026-27 cycle closed May 26, 2026, and Iowa's FY27 application was due June 30, 2026.
3. Line up institutional partners

   Owner: nursing program director. When: before drafting. Bring in your CTE office, hospital clinical partners and grants office so mentorship, clinical placements and seat growth are planned together.
4. Draft a faculty pilot with a baseline and targets

   Owner: nursing dean with your faculty development lead. When: during proposal writing. Record current faculty retention, professional development participation and seat counts. Then set targets, such as Del Mar's 90 percent faculty retention goal, tied to at least one Perkins accountability measure.
5. Secure college leadership sign-off

   Owner: dean and senior academic leadership. When: before submission. Required certifications need authorized signatures. In Texas these include debarment, lobbying and federal reporting forms.
6. Re-check the current RFA for program changes

   Owner: grants office. When: every cycle. Texas, for example, is phasing out two older Perkins grant tracks on August 31, 2026, so do not rely on last year's tracks or priorities.