The Editor
Taylor Rupe is the founder and editor of phdnursingprograms.com. He holds degrees in psychology from the University of Washington and computer science from Oregon State University, and works as a software engineer. He built the pipeline behind this site: every institution reporting a nursing research doctorate to IPEDS was checked against that school's own doctoral listings, the research funding figures come from NIH RePORTER, and the wage figures come from the BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics release. He is not a nurse and not a nurse scientist, and this site publishes no clinical advice. What it does is make the public record on nursing PhD programs comparable, and show its work.
This site is commercial, and the footer says how it makes money. What it does not do is let that decide the order. The model runs on public data, the weights are published, and no school can pay to move. If the ranking is worth anything to you, it is because you can check it, so everything it rests on is on the site: the sources, the weights, and the pages each figure was read from.
How the Rankings Are Built
Every institution reporting a nursing research doctorate to IPEDS was checked against that school's own doctoral-programs listing. 180 institutions went in and 42 came out, because the federal award level is self-reported and nursing schools report it loosely: roughly a third of the institutions that look like they run a research doctorate offer only a DNP. Programs the federal data missed entirely were added after checking the school's own listings, which is how a doctorate with no recent completions still appears here.
What survives is 140 programs at 138 universities across 46 states and territories. Campus and online programs are scored on two separate models and the lists are never merged, because a funded residential doctorate and one you pay for while working are not the same purchase. The full model is published, weights included. Nothing is hand-placed and no school can pay to move.
The editorial note on each program card is written for the page it sits on. A school reads differently on the national list, where you can move anywhere and the axis is research money, than on its own state page, where you are choosing between three schools you could drive to. Those are different questions, so they get different answers rather than the same paragraph twice.
Where the Data Comes From
- IPEDS Completions and Institutional Characteristics. Program counts, degrees conferred, institutional facts.
- BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics. Wage medians and percentile spreads by occupation and state.
- NIH RePORTER. National Institute of Nursing Research awards by institution.
- Program pages published by the schools themselves. Curriculum, funding, delivery format, admission requirements.
Nothing is estimated, adjusted or modelled from another figure. A number is in one of those four sources or it is not on the page, and every program card lists the pages its figures were read from, so you can check any of them yourself.
What This Site Will Not Tell You
It publishes no clinical advice and no personalised guidance about your career. The editor is not a nurse and not a nurse scientist, which is why the scoring model is written out in full rather than described in a sentence. If you want to disagree with the weights, they are on that page and you can.
You will not find an accreditation column anywhere here, and that is not an oversight. CCNE and ACEN accredit BSN, MSN and DNP programs. Neither accredits research doctorates, so there is no programmatic accreditor to check a nursing PhD against, and inventing a column for one would be worse than leaving it out.
You will also not find employment projections. The wage data here is the BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics survey, which measures what people are paid now and carries no forecast of how many jobs will exist later. Anything claiming otherwise on a site like this was made up.
How This Site Makes Money
Through advertising and, where a program partners with us, referral compensation when a reader requests information. Sponsored placements carry a label and sit outside the rankings. The model runs the same way on every program whether it pays or not.
Telling Us Something Is Wrong
Programs change their credit counts, deadlines and funding every year, and some of what is here will be out of date before the next refresh. If you run one of these programs, or you are in one, and something on your card is wrong, email help@hakia.com and say what and where. Corrections are made against the school's own published page.
If you hold a nursing doctorate and want to review or correct something here, that would improve the site and it would be credited.