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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Article on WSJ https://www.wsj.com/health/healthcare/nurse-practitioner-is-now-the-hottest-job-in-healthcare-a98e0bc8

NP seems like a great career, not sure why it's not as talked about as pre-med especially esp given many weed out of the latter by end of freshman year.

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They do not make the same salary at all. 
They are never in charge, they do not have control over their schedules or vacations like docs do.
They do not have the training to manage the most complex patients nor identify the rarer cases in primary care. 
The insurances used to reimburse similarly for NP versus MD visits as NP were "overseen" by MD. That has changed in the past 5 years and is almost gone. The lower reimbursements make physician groups and hospitals less likely to hire as many NPs because they are not the financial boost to the bottom line as they once were. 
The online training is terrible and a huge red flag. No one prefers to hire them now that we all have seen the poor quality of the education. These are predatory programs and should not exist. 
The recent surge in medical school financial aid is rapidly making the cost for 4 years of medical school the same or less than 2 years of the reputable(non online) NP and PA schools. Med school financial aid, merit and need, has exploded this cycle and will continue to grow, after the loan limits happened. It is happening at all MD programs not merely the very top or the weaker ones. They all want to get the best students they can get for their relative level of med school and are using merit $ to get the class they want. The top 25 or so have need based aid for all who are admitted. 
Even with loans for 4 full years of medical school, the low-end doctor salary of 250k for primary care will pay off 4 years of loans much faster than an NP salary for 2 yrs of school loans. For specialist MDs, they make 400-600k and beyond, while the NP in those areas if they can even get a job in that area make 110-120k, only 10k more than primary care NP.

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This post is spot on! 
I'm an NP married to an MD.  I trained 20 Yrs ago and back then you could go to graduate school and become an NP for around 30-50k. Almost everyone who did so were experienced RNs and most forms required 2-3 years of acute care (i.e. hospital based) nursing experience for admission.

Now the NP graduate programs are like 150-200k!!! You'll never recoup
that an NP because you're going to be making 120K as an NP vs the 100k you were making as an RN.  it makes zero financial sense.  Also, the idea of going straight to graduate school AND many of the programs being online (!!!) is complete lunacy.  [/quote]

That is so interesting, I'd love a breakdown on why that happened. It sounds predatory, frankly.

It reminds me of what happen to the librarian career over the last 30 years or so. You used to be able to get library jobs with a BA, then the masters in library science emerged and that gradually became the standard until it became impossible to get a librarian job in almost any library setting without an MLS. Then 20 years ago I started seeing more dual degree librarians, JD/MLS, MBA/MLS, etc. because of requirements for librarians with specialized research knowledge. But the math doesn't make sense. A JD/MLS has five years of graduate school totaling over 200k, and even with recent salary increases is going to top out at maybe 180k (and is much more likely to wind up in a role making 100-150k with no or very limited opportunities for advancement). Why would anyone ever pursue that? Yet I'll see it requested as a qualification for roles in law libraries and know maybe a dozen people with this background. All women.

I think credentialism for women is often a trap. They'll create a masters or certificate program for a female-dominated industry with the promise of higher salaries or a leg up in hiring, and women are particularly susceptible to this spin because they are more likely to doubt their qualification for a role or to not apply for roles unless they meet 100% of hiring requirements. But then it just becomes a cash cow for universities who then crank out more and more people with the same credential, thus devaluing it. The credential then becomes essential to proceed in the profession but offers no additional financial value.

Like I said, predatory.[/quote]

Library directors around our lake house in flyover country make great money and retire with a fat pension. It's a cush gig. They do literally nothing all day.[/quote]

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