Less than a decade into its existence, the Susan S. Morrison School of Nursing at St. Thomas will have more than doubled its cohort size and added and expanded two new facilities, including the still-in-development simulation space being built in the Schoenecker Center.
This year, as it graduates its first undergraduate cohort in May and prepares for its largest first-year group yet in the fall, school director Annette Hines said that the school is looking to firm up plans for a doctoral program in nursing while establishing its place in the Twin Cities’ medical community.
These needs for innovation have prompted the following initiatives and new goals:
Upcoming doctoral program
The school of nursing is set to launch a Doctor of Nursing Practice program, which Hines said will launch sometime “in the next few years.”
The DNP notably differs from a Ph.D in nursing, which emphasizes research, and instead prepares nurses for high-level nursing practice, according to the American Association of Colleges of Nursing. There were 426 DNP programs in the U.S. as of 2023 according to the AACN, with 80 more in development at the time. A nurse with a DNP is also separate from the functional role of a doctor, even if they can be addressed as such because of their doctorate.
St. Thomas’ DNP program, which Hines said is still under review for both university and external accreditation, will be primarily online.
“We’ve done a needs assessment, and it seems pretty clear that working nurses, that’s just what they prefer,” Hines said. “That way they can complete the work on their time, because oftentimes they’re working different shifts, different hours and weekends, so it’s hard to have in-person classes. It’s even hard to have it meet at the same time of day for people because they’re working different shifts.”
Members of the cohort will still likely come in for a short-term residency at the start of the program in order to bond and meet faculty in-person, Hines said. She said that the school will still need to hire new faculty to teach the program, as well.
While not every undergraduate student who passes through Susan S. Morrison Hall for their bachelor’s in nursing may be interested in getting their doctorate — at least initially — Hines said that simply having the program will strengthen recognition and create a pipeline with the current bachelor’s and master’s offerings.
“We’re not counting on that to make our undergraduate programs any bigger,” Hines said. “They’re big enough; we’ve got that plan taken care of. This is just sort of the icing on the cake, as you will.”
Nursing’s largest class yet
The fall 2026 semester will see the first-year undergraduate nursing cohort make its next — and final — increase in size, Hines said.
She said 125 is the number that nursing will stick to “from here on out” for new cohorts. The number dates back to the goals set out by the school’s founder, Martha Scheckel, in 2020, which planned for a steady increase in students as logistics fell into place.
“We’re ready,” Hines said. “We’ve got clinical sites for them, we’ve got faculty to teach them, classroom space.”
The current first-year cohort has 90 students, Hines said, which has gone up from the 50 that it welcomed in its first undergraduate class in 2022. Those students will be graduating with the school’s inaugural pinning ceremony, to be held on May 21.
The final step for the first batch of Tommie nurses is to pass their licensure exam, which Hines said is done individually in the months after graduation. The master’s students from St. Thomas who have taken the exam thus far have achieved overall pass rates of 92 and 93%, and Hines said she hopes the undergraduate students’ results will be comparable.
Health-y job market, health-y university
Once students pass, many other numbers tend to be in their favor, as well.
Timothy O’Neil, a regional labor market analyst for the Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic Development, wrote in an email to The Crest that healthcare and social assistance make up the largest-employing industry in both Minnesota and the Twin Cities.
They’re also the largest-growing, and O’Neil wrote that they will continue to be so “through the next 10 years.” DEED’s quarterly jobs census revealed that while jobs across all industries remained flat from Q2 2019-2025, over 40,000 healthcare jobs were created during that time — a 14.4% increase.
O’Neil wrote that the aging population is one of the main sources driving nursing demand. The number of people in the metro area who are 85 years or older is projected to increase just over 100% from 2025 to 2045, according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau.
The caregiving gap also grew wider after the pandemic. Research by the National Council of State Boards of Nursing found that approximately 100,000 nurses had left the field during the COVID-19 pandemic as of 2023, and another 610,388 nurses reported “intent to leave” by 2027.
Hines said that the employment options in Minnesota are “great,” and the need for nurses across the state has meant that every graduated master’s student who wanted to be employed right after graduating has found a job.
In a recent interview with The Crest, St. Thomas Vice President for Neighborhood Relations Jerome Benner said the university is interested in expanding the nursing school as part of a major redevelopment initiative it hopes to set in motion on the university’s mid-campus, where Susan S. Morrison Hall already sits.
Benner said that St. Thomas anticipates a demographic shift leading to “not as many young people to go around,” and that being forward-thinking with developments in emerging fields like nursing will help the university stay competitive.
Making a name in the Twin Cities
Competition isn’t top-of-mind for Hines, but she said that St. Thomas’ university-wide goal of whole-person education has trickled down to set UST nursing apart.
“I think St. Thomas is just the best combination of: you come to a school that’s very much going to prepare you for nursing, but also prepare you for life, because the way the general education courses continue the whole time that they’re here … it isn’t that way at a lot of nursing schools,” Hines said.
Hines said that the school aspires to be thought of among the best-known nursing programs in the Twin Cities. She said Tommie nursing students working their clinical hours in local health institutions are the “best ambassadors” for that reputation-building.
To earn their hours, UST students are working in a variety of places and fields, from major hospitals like Hennepin County Medical Center and Children’s Minnesota to Our Lady of Peace hospice care and public schools. Even St. Thomas’ Center for Well-Being has students in purple scrubs helping out.
“When the students are in the sites, they do a great job. They see them as potential employees, and for the students it’s potential employment,” Hines said. “So building that track record is so important, and that’s what we’re doing. So then we’re able to return, and then hopefully each time we return maybe we can bring a few more students or have another shift another day.”
Hines said that she has already seen the effect current nursing students have had in establishing St. Thomas as a force in the Twin Cities nursing scene.
“I saw an ad for another school on TV, who was saying, ‘And we’re also nationally accredited, just like the U of M and St. Thomas,’ and this was for a nursing school,” Hines said. “And I thought, ‘Wow, we’re already up there.’”
While nursing may be hitting its stride in terms of cohort sizes and finalizing new expansions, Hines said not to be surprised if the Morrison school remains in the news, procuring new grant funding or updating facilities; in fact, it just added virtual reality to its simulation programs this past year.
“The newness may kind of wear off, but healthcare is so dynamic and always changing, so we always have to be innovators,” Hines said. “… So we’re always going to be improving, even though what we have now is a great product, but that’s just healthcare. We’re always trying to innovate, do it better.”
Kevin Lynch can be reached at lync1832@stthomas.edu.
