600 Programs. 39,000 Graduates. 500 Unregulated Hours. According to U.S. Department of Education data reviewed by Bloomberg Businessweek, more than 600 schools offered advanced nursing degrees in 2022. That is three times the number of medical schools in this country. In that same year, 39,000 nurse practitioners graduated from those programs, a 50 percent increase from 2017. That explosion did not happen because we found a way to produce better-trained clinicians at scale. It happened because there is money in it. Bloomberg documented dozens of nursing students and professors saying programs are graduating thousands of students not properly prepared to care for patients. Institutions that offer primarily online training gave out the most degrees. The former director of the country's largest NP program acknowledged she could not recall ever denying a single applicant. NPs are required to complete a minimum of 500 hours of supervised clinical training before licensure. According to Bloomberg's review, those hours are often unregulated. Many online programs do not even help students find clinical placements. John Canion, an emergency medicine NP and one of the loudest reform voices within the profession itself, testified at the AMA State Advocacy Summit that programs have no meaningful oversight of how those 500 hours are spent. He stated that programs cannot confirm whether a student was ever in a clinical setting, sat in a broom closet, or even showed up. To put 500 hours in context: the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation requires 1,000 hours of supervised instruction before it will license a cosmetology operator. Someone who will be diagnosing illness, ordering diagnostic studies, and prescribing controlled substances is held to half that standard. The fastest initial NP licensure programs now run 12 months. Vanderbilt and others openly advertise one-year pathways for BSN-prepared nurses. A physician completing residency has between 12,000 and 16,000 hours of supervised clinical training, built through a nationally standardized accreditation system with no online pathway and no accelerated option. There are no online medical schools. The hours-in-training gap is at minimum 16 to 1. Many programs now also offer direct-entry tracks for applicants with bachelor's degrees in unrelated fields and no clinical experience, preparing them for licensure in as little as three years. This is not the traditional pathway of an experienced bedside nurse earning an advanced practice credential. It is a production model built around enrollment revenue, not patient outcomes. When Bloomberg published its investigation, the American Association of Nurse Practitioners responded by accusing the publication of cherry-picking negative information. Attacking the journalism instead of addressing the substance tells you everything you need to know about where the profession's leadership stands on the underlying problem.