Anyone who can get student loans is appealing to programs of all types, which is why everyone is trying to open a PA school now too. It’s the entire higher education system altogether.
The reason why NP schools are thriving is because the work environment for nurses is getting so onerous. Why should an RN stay at the bedside and put up with new mandates each quarter when they could endure school and then come out with a job that doesn’t slap a tracker on your ID badge lariat that detects whether you stood in front of a sink for 30 seconds to wash your hands before walking out of a patient’s room. Then they want weekly meetups with a supervisor to go over any deviations from the tracker. I kid you not, that very thing is making my hospital admin salivate at the chance to implement it like a neighboring hospital system did. Add that to the sensor that detects whether you go into a patient’s room every hour to “round”, and the physical paper you fill out and handoff every shift where you sign indicating that you did exactly what the sensor detects that you did, and you have to get that signed by the shift supervisor before you hand it to someone else. Then every day someone comes in behind you and asks your patients how you did the day before, and how often they perceived that you came in to check on them, because it’s not only important to check on them, but to be perceived that you are checking in them. So you need to check on them, be perceived as checking on them, but also must not be seen as disturbing them (in other words, if they sleep through your visits, you are encouraged to tell them about how you checked on them every hour).
That kind of stuff is why nurses are taking their heartbeats to school to find a better job, and why crap is rolling uphill to affect the provider market as a whole. Physicians will feel the crunch when the same people making rules for nurses start looking at how cheap they can hire NPs vs physicians.