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The second-degree program experience is similar at the University of Arizona, where 48 students with non-nursing degrees are finding their way to the profession, lured partly by the opportunity to work anywhere and without the fear of layoffs.

"There's such a high demand for nurses everywhere in the country. I want to have the security of knowing that I'll be able to find a job," said Jameela Ameen, 27, who graduated in 1999 from UofA with a degree in molecular and cellular biology. "One of the problems I had after working five years on my degree was that there just wasn't a job market, especially here in Arizona, for a molecular and cellular biologist with a bachelor's degree," she said.

Ameen worked for a time as a lab technician at University Medical Center in Tucson, then joined a company that made artificial hearts. When that didn't pan out after a couple of months, she spent two years with the U.S. Border Patrol before deciding she needed something more conducive to family life. She was accepted into the UofA's 14-month accelerated BSN program and expects to graduate in August.

So will classmate Michael Grizinski, 49, who has a bachelor's degree in premedical sociology from Notre Dame University and a master's degree in microbiology. For 18 years, Grizinski cobbled together a career mostly at the UofA, moving from one grant-funded position to another and department to department when budgets were cut.

"If the grant wasn't renewed, you were gone," said Grizinski, which accounted for his stints in cancer research, optical sciences pathology, microbiology, veterinary sciences and plant sciences. Along the way, he worked at an environmental testing lab in Flagstaff, Ariz., and joined a cancer diagnostics startup company in Tucson, but was laid off after eight months when the company switched directions.

"I started doing some soul searching," said Grizinski, who once considered medical school. A local news story about the depth of the nursing shortage tipped him to the accelerated nursing degree program and he was accepted.

In conjunction with the College of Nursing, University Medical Center and Carondelet Health Network each underwrite 24 students, in exchange for a two-year work commitment after graduation.

"Not having to worry about tuition is a blessing. I'm surviving on savings to make it through school," Grizinski said. The beauty of nursing, he said, is its variety, from bedside practice to academics, research and pharmacology, as well as the ability to work at will.

"I guess I could see myself retiring," he said, although he is inclined to be like his late father, a general practice physician. "My dad practiced medicine for 54 years. He kept practicing until he was forced [by prostate cancer] to step down."

A raincheck on retirement

For many nurses, particularly women who are single, any retirement coming out of the recession seems out of the question.

Take Maurcena Wells, RN, of Albu-querque, N.M. After 36 years at two hospitals and under a succession of owners, last year she felt that for health and safety reasons she no longer could work on-call nights. So she opted for PRN as a registered nurse first assistant in neurosurgery.

Wells, 64, began drawing a pension at age 55 from 16 years with one hospital. "It barely covers utilities," she said. A second retirement account, built during the last 20 years at another facility and invested in stock market mutual funds, awaits her, but the decline in the value of the market through the recession has eroded her retirement to the point that Wells said it will not sustain the income she needs.

"I plan to keep working as long as I can because I do need the income. I still want to take trips and do some things to the house: new carpet, painting," she said. "I have to keep working."

Wells said that after February, she will reassess her Social Security benefit and look at how much she will be able to draw from retirement to see whether the figures add up. By then she will be eligible for Medicare, but that alone-a savings of more than $300 a month in health insurance premiums-probably isn't enough to spring her from the workforce, she said.

"There are other people who are sort of in the same boat as I am," she said.

Various retirement studies bear her out. A Heinz Foundation study determined that only 18 percent of women aged 65 and older receive any pension benefit. Because Social Security is calculated on lifetime earnings, women-who often enter the workforce later than men and drop out for years to raise families-often do not receive income sufficient to retire.