Utah has the fewest nurses per capita of any state in the nation — an undesirable distinction it’s held for two years in a row.

Coming this fall, though, a new nursing school set to open in Sandy hopes to remedy that shortfall. It will mark the first Utah location for Chamberlain University, a private, for-profit institution headquartered in Chicago.

Applications are being accepted as of Tuesday. And classes are set to start Oct. 26.

Amelia Manning, the president of Chamberlain University, said in a statement that the school wants to “make it easier for the next generation of Utah nurses to train here, stay here and step into this community ready to care for the patients who need them.”

Currently, the state has 1,399 nurses per 100,000 residents, according to 2025 data collected by the National Council of State Boards of Nursing. The state with the highest was Alaska at 3,139 nurses per 100,000 residents.

“Utah’s patients and communities feel that gap every day,” the school added in its news release about the opening.

The new Chamberlain campus will open in Sandy on the third floor of an existing office building at 9490 S. 300 West, near Colonial Flag and Salt Lake Community College’s Miller campus.

Enrolled students will earn a bachelor’s in nursing on an accelerated three-year timeline. The school said the Sandy campus is specifically for students “seeking a flexible pathway” to becoming a registered nurse, with night, weekend and online classes offered so students can pursue a degree “without stepping away from their lives, their families or the communities.”

Students will complete clinical rotations with local partners, including DaVita (which provides dialysis for patients with kidney failure) and Odyssey House of Utah (a residential sober-living treatment program for those with substance use disorder).

A shortage of clinical partners is one of the issues currently impacting how many nursing degrees the state’s public universities and colleges can offer and how quickly they can graduate students.

Weber State University has one of the largest nursing programs in the state, along with the University of Utah and Utah Tech University. But there’s often not enough seats available in those programs for the number of interested students.

As a result, more private, online, for-profit and nonprofit schools have been coming into the state as competition — which a 2024 state audit noted.

That includes Joyce University of Nursing & Health Sciences, Nightingale College and Western Governors University. Additionally, Galen College of Nursing recently announced it would introduce a bachelor’s in nursing at its Draper, Utah, campus; previously, it was offering an associate degree in the field.

Those often cost double the tuition of public schools but tend to get students in and out quicker. Chamberlain, for instance, has a three-year program that runs at about $100,000 at full cost; a comparable degree at the U. — which has the highest tuition in Utah’s public system — would take about four years and cost about $44,000 at sticker price (without scholarships or financial aid).

The state audit saidt said between 2007 and 2014, 35% of qualified applicants for public bachelor’s nursing programs in the state were turned away. And between 2016 and 2022, the Utah System of Higher Education saw a 14% loss in its market share of students in nursing. Nontraditional schools, meanwhile, experienced a 24% gain.

Utah House Speaker Mike Schultz said at the time the audit came out he was “extremely concerned” by that.

When Utah State University tried to expand the number of students who could enroll in its nursing program, though, as part of its response to state-imposed higher education budget cuts and reallocations, lawmakers declined that proposal and said other public universities could fill the need.

“I think there’s other institutions that can pick that up,” Schultz said then, noting USU should instead focus on its land-grant mission.

Chamberlain University says it’s the largest nursing school in the U.S. With its expansion to Utah, it will have 26 campuses in 17 states. It serves 40,000 students across those.

The school said in its news release that it currently has more than 200 alumni working in nursing jobs in Utah, too.

Chamberlain sits under parent company Covista, which also oversees American University of the Caribbean School of Medicine, Ross University School of Medicine, Ross University School of Veterinary Medicine and Walden University.