As of January 2026, the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP) received a gift of $1.5 million from the University Medical Center of El Paso (UMC) to help expand faculty for UTEP’s nursing and health sciences programs.
Texas is facing a national shortage of healthcare professionals. According to Texas Tech Health El Paso’s Gayle Greve Hunt School of Nursing, Texas is projected to have a shortage of 60,000 nurses by 2030. The $1.5 million gift is to help ease this shortage, aiming for UTEP to graduate 400 nursing students and 45 occupational therapy (OT) students per year by 2028.
According to the Dean of School of Nursing, Leslie Robbins, Ph.D., over the next three years, UTEP is projected to hire six nursing faculty and three OT faculty in the health sciences. Nursing will have more class sections, moving from one to possibly three, keeping a manageable number of students per class, including clinicals, which typically allow only a certain number of students per clinical section…