Scoring model, version 1.0
How We Score PhD in Nursing Programs
Edited by Taylor Rupe, Founder & Editor. Last revised August 18, 2026.
Every program here is scored out of 100 by the same model, and the model is on this page so you can disagree with it. If you think funding should count for more than research money, you can read the weights, work out roughly where a program would land under your own priorities, and use the factor breakdown on each ranking to do it.
Why There Are Two Lists Instead of One
A campus PhD and an online PhD are different purchases. On campus you're usually funded, usually full time, and what you're really buying is five years next to a research team. Online you're usually paying your own way, keeping your nursing job, and what you're buying is a doctorate that bends around a working week.
Put both on one list and every online program sinks, not because it's worse but because it's optimised for things the campus scoring doesn't reward. So we score them separately, with different weights, and we never merge the two rankings. The campus ranking and the online ranking are both complete lists of their own kind.
What Counts as a PhD in Nursing Here
Research doctorates only: the PhD, and the older DNS and DNSc where a school still awards one. The DNP is a practice doctorate and it is a different degree with a different point, so it isn't ranked here. Plenty of the schools on these lists offer both, and where that's true the program profile says so.
You won't find an accreditation column anywhere on this site, and that's not an omission. CCNE and ACEN accredit BSN, MSN and DNP programs. Neither body accredits research doctorates, so there is no programmatic accreditor to check a nursing PhD against. What you can check is the institution's regional accreditation, and every school on these lists has it.
The Campus Scoring Model
Six factors, weighted to sum to 100. Research money and student funding carry nearly half of it between them, because those two facts change what a PhD costs you and what you get out of it more than anything else on the page.
| Factor | Weight | Measured from |
|---|---|---|
| Nursing research funding | 25% | Total National Institute of Nursing Research awards to the institution across fiscal years 2021 through 2025, from NIH RePORTER, on a log scale. A research PhD is an apprenticeship, and what you're apprenticed to is funded research. Money in the building is the closest public measure of whether there is active work to join. |
| Student funding | 22% | What the program publishes about tuition support, stipends, assistantships and traineeships for its own doctoral students. Full funding turns a six-figure decision into a salaried one. It changes the answer more than any other single fact about a program. |
| Doctoral program scale | 18% | Nursing doctorates conferred per year at the research level in IPEDS completions, restricted to the CIP codes that name a field of study rather than an advanced-practice role, on a log scale. A school running a large nursing doctoral operation has the faculty, the supervision capacity and the infrastructure that a small one does not. Note what this is not: schools report the research level loosely in nursing, so the figure covers the doctoral enterprise rather than the PhD alone, and it is used to separate large operations from small ones rather than to count PhDs. |
| Time and cost to degree | 13% | Published time to completion, and per-credit tuition where the student is the one paying it. Two extra years is two years of a nursing salary you did not earn. It belongs in the score. |
| Program structure | 12% | Declared research areas, credit hours, dissertation requirement, and how many entry points the program admits from. A program with six named research areas can match you to an adviser. A program with one can match you if you happen to want that one. |
| Access and flexibility | 10% | Part-time enrolment, GRE requirement, BSN-to-PhD entry, and whether full-time study is mandatory. Most applicants are working nurses in their thirties. A program that only admits full-time students who took the GRE has ruled out most of them. |
The Online Scoring Model
Same idea, different priorities. Delivery moves to the top because online nursing PhD programs are not equally online, and the gap between three days on campus a year and a week on campus every semester is the difference between a program you can do and one you can't. Cost moves up because online doctoral students are usually paying for it themselves. Research funding stays on the list, at a lower weight, because your dissertation committee still comes from that faculty.
| Factor | Weight | Measured from |
|---|---|---|
| Delivery and residency | 25% | How the coursework is delivered, and exactly what the program still requires you to attend in person. Online PhD programs are not equally online. Three days on campus a year and one week a semester are different degrees for a nurse working full time. |
| Cost per credit | 20% | Published per-credit tuition for the doctoral program. Online doctoral students are usually paying their own way, so the sticker price is the price. |
| Access and flexibility | 18% | Part-time enrolment, GRE requirement, entry points, and whether full-time study is mandatory. You are keeping your job. Everything that lets the program bend around that is worth points. |
| Program structure | 15% | Declared research areas, credit hours, dissertation requirement, and entry points. An online PhD still ends in a dissertation. The structure that gets you there has to be real. |
| Doctoral program scale | 12% | Nursing doctorates conferred per year at the research level in IPEDS completions, restricted to the CIP codes that name a field of study. A school that already runs doctoral education at scale has the supervision capacity to run it at a distance too. |
| Nursing research funding | 10% | National Institute of Nursing Research awards to the institution, fiscal years 2021 through 2025, from NIH RePORTER. It counts for less here than on the campus list, because you will not be in the lab. It still counts, because your dissertation committee comes from that faculty. |
Why a Program Reads Differently on Two Pages Here
The same school's card says different things on the national list and on its state page, and that is deliberate rather than an accident of generation. On the national list you can move anywhere, so what matters is research money, funding and how long the degree takes. On a state page you are choosing between the three or four schools you could actually drive to, so what matters is what separates those three or four from each other: which one is cheapest, which one funds you, which one takes you from a BSN, which one lets you keep working.
Those are different questions and they deserve different answers, so each card is written once per page it appears on rather than written once and repeated. It also means a state page can compare one program to another by name, which the national list deliberately does not do: an in-state comparison is true on the page it sits on, and it would be wrong the moment the same words appeared next to a different set of schools.
There are no individual school pages on this site. The card is the page. Everything a school publishes about its program sits inside the card, under the disclosure, along with the pages it was read from.
How a Factor Becomes a Number
Money and counts are scored on a log scale against every other program on the same list, so a school with four times the research funding of another scores higher without the top few programs flattening everyone below them into a single band. Time to degree and cost per credit are inverted, so shorter and cheaper score higher. The rest are rule-based: a program that funds tuition and pays a stipend scores higher than one that offers assistantships, which scores higher than one that offers neither.
Where a school hasn't published a figure, that factor scores at the median of every other program on the list rather than at zero. A thin program page is a fact about a website, not about a doctorate, and zeroing it would quietly rank the schools that publish least at the bottom of every list.
Where the Numbers Come From
Four sources, and every figure on this site traces back to one of them.
- 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.
Program pages get read, not summarised from a directory. The curriculum, funding and deadline figures on a program profile come from that school's own pages, and each profile lists the pages they came from.
What We Don't Do
No school pays for a position on any list here, and no ranking is adjusted by hand after the model runs. Where a listing is sponsored it carries a label saying so, and it sits outside the ranking rather than inside it.
We also don't survey deans, and we don't score reputation. Peer-reputation surveys mostly measure which schools were famous ten years ago, and a nurse choosing between two PhD programs today is better served by knowing which one funds its students.
When This Changes
The federal data refreshes annually and the program pages get re-read on the same cycle. When the weights change, the version number at the top of this page changes with them and the date underneath it moves. This is version 1.0, covering 92 campus programs and 48 online programs across 46 states.