Colorado State University Pueblo is taking its nursing expertise north. Beginning fall 2026, the university will launch a first-of-its-kind 3+2 Direct Entry Nursing Program at CSU Fort Collins, the first academic collaboration between two campuses in the CSU System. Students will pursue a five-year accelerated path to a Master of Science in nursing leadership, awarded by CSU Pueblo, which has offered graduate nursing programs for years and remains the only institution in southern Colorado doing so.
Up to 40 students per year will be admitted to the competitive program after completing pre-nursing coursework in three undergraduate majors at Fort Collins. The program earned approval from the Colorado State Board of Nursing in October and is backed by CSU Pueblo’s national accreditation through the Accreditation Commission for Education in Nursing.
For Dean of Nursing Kristine Morris, who has led CSU Pueblo’s School of Nursing since May 2025, the expansion is a natural next step. “The exciting part for us in Pueblo is extending the reach of developing nurses on the Front Range beyond southern Colorado,” she said. “By launching this in Fort Collins, we’re giving students a unique opportunity for multidisciplinary and interprofessional collaboration with other health care professionals and scientists.”
The program isn’t just about geography. Morris is deliberate about what problem it’s actually solving. Colorado doesn’t simply need more nurses. It needs nurses prepared for leadership, for the classroom, for the advanced roles that hold healthcare systems together. “It’s not just about how many,” she said. “It’s about which kind and where.”
Graduates who work as registered nurses for two or more years will be qualified to teach in nursing schools, filling a gap that has quietly become a crisis. Nationally, nursing programs turned away more than 78,000 qualified applicants last year simply because there weren’t enough faculty to teach them. The 3+2 program is designed to produce nurses who can eventually solve that problem too.
The urgency behind all of it comes back to a single statistic Morris returns to often. A quarter of Colorado’s registered nursing workforce is over 60. That retirement cliff isn’t a future concern. It’s already arriving, and what it threatens to take with it isn’t just headcount.
Morris has been a registered nurse since 1992, with most of her clinical career spent in adult intensive care. She knows firsthand what it means to learn from nurses who had decades on her. “When you earn the respect of the nurse that you used to be afraid of, there’s nothing better,” she said. That generation is retiring now. “We are about to lose their collective experience and wisdom.”
The new curriculum tries to account for that. It includes training in resilience and self-care alongside leadership preparation and coursework focused on health inequities and rural and underserved populations. Morris connects the resilience component directly to what the pandemic did to the profession. Burnout drove an estimated 100,000 nurses out of the field. The cultural moment that followed, she thinks, left its own mark. “Anytime you’re called a hero, maybe you have a job that other people don’t want and they’re a little bit afraid of.”
She’s also paying attention to who’s coming into nursing now. Younger nurses are faster with technology, more adaptive, and more deliberate about protecting their own well-being. Morris doesn’t read that last part as a problem. “Nurses of my generation worked ourselves to death,” she said. “The newer generation is doing much better about creating boundaries around their work life. I think perhaps they have a better idea of how to strike that balance.”
The 3+2 program, housed at the CSU Health and Medical Center in Fort Collins, launches with funding already in place from the H.A. and Mary K. Chapman Foundation, equipment from UCHealth, and $1.5 million in directed federal spending. Additional fundraising is ongoing.
