Op-Ed: Nebraska’s workforce gap has a solution hiding in plain sight

Posted on September 28, 2026 by Nebraska Children — Leave a comment

A teacher assists a group of six children at a table, as they work on their assignments and share ideas in a classroom setting.

This op-ed originally ran in the Lincoln Journal Star on 9/25/2026.

Nebraska needs more nurses. Nebraska needs more teachers. Walk into a nursing program or a teacher-prep classroom, and you’ll notice the same thing: almost no men.

That’s a missed opportunity Nebraska can’t afford.

The Nebraska Statewide Educational and Workforce Data System (NSWERS) recently released its “Brief on the Employment Gap in Nebraska,” and the message is clear: the state has a major shortage of teachers and nurses. This reflects a national trend, as shown in Bureau of Labor Statistics data, with teaching ranking among occupations with the most projected openings. Teaching has more than 2,000 openings a year in our state, and Nebraska graduates fill only 32% of that need. Registered nursing has more than 1,800 openings a year, with 46% unmet. Licensed practical nursing is even more strained, with 76% of demand going unfilled. These shortages have been Nebraska’s largest workforce gaps since 2018. Yet men remain underrepresented in both fields: roughly 7% of registered nurses are men, 27% of teachers are men, and just 10% of elementary teachers are men.

You can’t fix a shortage this size with a recruiting poster or any single intervention. But two things can start today: real academic support for boys in K-12, and healthcare and education programs designed specifically to recruit and welcome them, the same intentionality once brought to getting women into STEM, where there is still more work to do.

Let’s start upstream, before youth even consider careers. From 1992 to 2022, Nebraska’s fourth-grade boys scored above the national male average in reading. A 7.5-point drop by 2024 put them below it, and below their 1992 rate. Nebraska boys have lagged girls in reading proficiency for 20 years, and the gap widens over time: four points behind their female peers in third grade, 10 points by eighth. A gap appears again in FAFSA completion, where boys have trailed girls in completion for three straight graduating classes by as much as 16 percentage points. But boys are still planning for a future. They make up 53 percent of Nebraska’s career and technical education concentrators, often choosing trades, agriculture, and IT. They are absent from the fields where the state’s unmet demand is greatest. These are HEAL fields, health, education, administration and literacy, and they need the same intentional recruitment that pulled women into STEM. That is the work the American Institute for Boys and Men is leading across several states and the work that Nebraska must take on.

We’re working to close the gap by getting boys and men into fields where they’re missing, not forcing interest where it doesn’t exist. That’s the work Beyond School Bells, an initiative of Nebraska Children and Families Foundation, is doing with community partners across urban and rural Nebraska. We see real value in out-of-school time: the hours before and after school, on weekends and over the summer, when programs can try things a regular class period can’t. This year we launched a Boys in HEAL pilot that has reached over 300 boys, healthcare camps and internships at a rural hospital, a boys-only healthcare event with postsecondary mentors, and career exposure and mentoring through an Omaha-based mentoring nonprofit. A forthcoming Coaches Academy will take the same approach into education, using coaching and sports, often a boy’s earliest trusted relationship outside his family, as a way into the classroom.

Three hundred boys is a start, but not enough against the projected 2,000 teaching and 1,800 nursing openings. This doesn’t reach the scale Nebraska needs without broader buy-in: schools willing to embrace partnerships, employers willing to co-design pathways and mentor the boys who walk into them, and state leaders willing to fund the work.

We can all help boys and men succeed in school and HEAL careers. If you are a teacher, tell the boy who is good with people that he would be good at teaching, too. Hospital staff can show them the work firsthand. Parents can discuss nursing and teaching careers at home. If you are a coach, talk about teaching the way you talk about playing at the next level. Policymakers can consider data on boys before making decisions.

Nebraska has proven this can work. It’s the reason both of us are standing here today, doing this work instead of watching from the sidelines. We need more of what helped us succeed. Teachers, coaches, mentors, policymakers, and neighbors must see the solution in plain sight: Nebraska’s workforce is already here, in our boys and men. Now we need the will to act.