Best PhD in Nursing Programs With No GRE, Ranked (2026)

Columbia is where you go to join research that already exists rather than invent a study from scratch. What stands in for the test is a convincing answer to which funded faculty project you'd slot into on arrival.

Where it wins. Its NINR total runs larger than Yale, UCSF, Boston College, Maryland, Villanova and Mizzou on this page added together, and the Research Residency bills your scholarly work at more than 20 hours a week, so you're inside a funded study rather than reading about one.

What you give up. Funding is written for three years and the completion figure reaches four, so there's a gap to plan for before you sign. It's full time only as well, which means there's no version of this that survives a nursing job.

Duke funds for up to five years against a three-to-four-year finish, so most students here run out of program before they run out of money. That inversion is rare enough to be the reason to apply.

Where it wins. Divide Duke's NINR money by its 41 awards and each project averages about $463,000, so the health equity work you'd join is already staffed and running. Elective credits also travel to UNC-Chapel Hill and NC State, widening your methods training past one school of nursing.

What you give up. The school hands out about 15 DNP degrees for every PhD, so the building's center of gravity sits with practice students. Expect a small cohort and go find your people early.

Four or five full-time seats a year is the real admissions story, not the missing test. A 3.0 floor with that few chairs is decoration; what gets read is the research statement and whether anyone at Meyers would supervise it.

Where it wins. Funding runs four years against a three-year published completion, so the money outlasts the degree instead of the other way round. The curriculum also builds in 1,200 research hours and 60 teaching hours, which means you leave with a teaching record attached to the dissertation.

What you give up. The part-time lane is new for Fall 2026, and the sentence promising stipend, benefits and tuition remission attaches to the full-time option. At $2,596 a credit, pin down which parts of the guarantee travel with you.

Dropping the GRE didn't make UCLA easier. A 3.5 floor plus a biostatistics course taken within the last three years and a graduate research course means the gate moved from a test to your transcript.

Where it wins. UCLA's 17 NINR awards average roughly $663,000 apiece, the largest average project size on this page. Fewer principal investigators, deeper studies, and doctoral output that is entirely PhD, with no DNP class competing for faculty attention.

What you give up. The tuition guarantee is for in-state rates, and the supplement covering nonresidents runs one year. If you arrive from out of state, plan on establishing California residency by year two or paying the difference yourself.

Nine nursing PhDs a year and zero DNP graduates, so nobody's attention is split with a practice cohort the way it is at the schools here handing out DNPs by the hundred. The 3.2 floor is published; fit with a lab is the real test.

Where it wins. Year two forces a choice most programs never make you state out loud: the quantitative track built on Biostats 200 and 208, or the sociology and qualitative track. You finish identified as one kind of methodologist, which is how postdoc committees read a CV.

What you give up. The stipend was $22,000 for students entering fall 2024, then $18,000 for 2025-26 and $18,000 again for 2026-27. That's a step down in one of the most expensive cities in the country, and the tuition promise is written as in-state.

Ninety-three NINR awards is the deepest research bench on this page, and the price of admission is a calendar: full-time fall, spring and summer from your first semester to your last. Availability is the filter here.

Where it wins. PhD students bargain collectively here, and the contract does the work: a $52,000 salary floor, a 20-hour weekly cap on assigned duties, and per-child subsidies up to $12,000 a year. Four guaranteed years puts $208,000 under you before anything else.

What you give up. Guaranteed money runs four years while the published finish is four to five, so budget for the gap year. The 43-credit course load is the lightest on this page; the research residency every semester is where the hours actually go.

Yale doesn't merely waive the test, it won't accept one. What replaces it is a harder filter than any exam: you need a master's already, because there's no bachelor's entry point, so the screening happened years before you applied.

Where it wins. Seventeen nursing PhDs a year and not one DNP: this school only makes researchers. The qualifying exam is a full dissertation proposal defended out loud at the end of year two, which front-loads the hardest thinking and is why four years actually holds.

What you give up. Four years of money against a four-year program leaves no slack anywhere, so a proposal that stalls in year two eats the cushion you don't have. Coming from a BSN, you'll pay for a master's before this door opens.

Ohio State awarded 48 nursing PhDs, the most on this page and about seven times what a typical program here graduates. The pipeline works, and that's a different claim than prestige.

Where it wins. Every student writes at least one external grant application, taught from year one, and submissions have hit a 65 percent funding rate over three years. You leave with a funded proposal on your record, which is the currency faculty jobs actually price.

What you give up. Scholar awards cover up to three years and the program runs three to five, so plan the fourth year yourself. Note also that the research areas are named labs, not themes: your application has to pick one and mean it.

Look for the catch in a $392-a-credit online PhD and the graduation numbers refuse to cooperate: nine nursing PhDs a year, more than Columbia, Boston College or Florida each produce on campus. What you commit to is a fixed semester sequence.

Where it wins. Sixty credits at $392 works out to $23,520 for the master's-entry track. Maryland charges $926 for the same sixty credits on this page, or $55,560, so you're paying under half for a degree that ends in the same defended dissertation.

What you give up. You bring your own dissertation question here; there's no NINR-funded lab to slot into the way there is at the campus programs on this list. Add the August campus week every year, and educational visas don't work with an online program.

The DNP-to-PhD route cuts the degree from 60 credits to 36, which saves about $12,400 and roughly three semesters. For a DNP already teaching, that arithmetic is the whole argument.

Where it wins. Sixty credits at IUP's rate totals under $31,000 in tuition, and rolling admission with a May cohort start means you can decide in March and be in class by summer. No campus visit is built into any of it.

What you give up. Dissertations here are self-funded questions about nursing education rather than a slot on somebody's existing grant. You bring the topic and you bring the tuition, and eleven semesters of coursework is a long stretch to sustain on your own money.

The clearest answer on this page to what replaces a test score: a written and verbal assessment recorded through Kira Talent, plus a sample of your scholarly writing. You're judged on how you argue, live, which is harder to cram for.

Where it wins. Nurse Faculty Loan Program money is the real story: tuition funded, up to 85% forgiven after a four-year teaching commitment. That turns $29,742 of post-master's tuition into something near $4,500 if a faculty job was already the plan.

What you give up. Everything runs part-time and the finish date gets set case by case, so your employer paces the degree as much as your committee does. Bachelor's entry is 90 credits, or $44,613 in tuition, before the dissertation starts.

Candidacy at Cincinnati is a portfolio, not a written exam, which changes what the middle of the degree feels like. You build a case across two years instead of surviving one week.

Where it wins. The three-year finish ties for the shortest on this page, and the door stays open longer than most: December 15 is the priority date, with final materials taken through May 15. Five months of runway if a recommender goes quiet.

What you give up. Two research areas, opioids and nurse violence, means fit is close to binary. Add a college that graduates twelve DNPs for every PhD, and a mismatched topic leaves you short on both mentors and money.

Everyone starts in summer, so there's one intake a year and no second chance if February 1 slips. The 3.3 minimum does the job the GRE used to do, and a transcript is much harder to fix than a test you can retake.

Where it wins. Admission doesn't require a nursing degree, and enrolled students have arrived from health administration, informatics, medical ethics, occupational and physical therapy, public health and social work. A dissertation sitting on the seam between fields gets a committee that has lived there.

What you give up. Seventy-two credits at $681.30 comes to $49,054, and the intensives put you in Columbia for four days every spring plus three in June to start, travel on you. The school graduates 41 DNPs a year against seven PhDs.

Roughly $15,000 in tuition covers the entire doctorate at East Carolina's rate, the cheapest path on this page by a wide margin. The 3.2 GPA floor is what replaced the test.

Where it wins. BSN-entry students pick nursing education or health systems leadership and bank master's-level coursework on the way through, so one application covers what usually takes two. Travel is a few days in Greenville each of the first three summers, then nothing.

What you give up. The research base is thin: two NINR awards against a college that graduated 81 DNPs and three PhDs. Cheap tuition buys you a credential and a dissertation, not a lab with people already in it.

One day a week in Baltimore is the real entrance requirement. There's no test and the GPA floor sits at 3.0, but a weekly commute for three or four years screens applicants harder than any exam ever did.

Where it wins. Your four elective slots can buy a second credential: the Real-World Data and Pragmatic Research certificate, or the teaching one, finished inside the same 60 credits with nothing added to the bill. For anyone aiming at a faculty line, that's a free second line on the CV.

What you give up. Nothing about the money is promised. Assistantships and the Conway award are competitive, merit scholarships top out at $3,000 a semester, and the sticker is $926 a credit, which makes 60 credits $55,560 if none of it lands.

VCU takes applications until July 1, later than anything else on this page, which makes it the realistic option if a spring plan fell through. You pick a concentration at application, though, so late doesn't mean casual.

Where it wins. Choosing biobehavioral research or health care quality at admission attaches you to a named faculty group from day one, and the concentration itself is six credits of the 58, so the commitment shapes your advising far more than your schedule.

What you give up. The assistantship that covers tuition demands nine credits and twenty hours a week, which is exactly the load the four-year part-time track exists to avoid. You can have the funding or the flexibility here, not both.

Eighty-seven credits is the heaviest load on this page, more than double the lightest one here, and bachelor's-to-PhD is the only entry point, so master's-level coursework happens inside those 87 rather than transferring in.

Where it wins. You can take the coursework live in Birmingham or in the distance-accessible format, and either way $11.9 million of NINR funding across 28 awards sits behind the faculty. Keeping a job while sitting next to funded studies at that scale is rare.

What you give up. The distance format costs $98 more per credit, which across 87 credits is $8,526 extra for the same degree taken from home. Fellowships are a limited number awarded when funds exist, and 178 DNPs graduate here each year against seven PhDs.

One flat rate for everybody, in state or out, is the actual product here. On most public programs the nonresident premium is the biggest number in the decision; Northern Colorado deletes it.

Where it wins. The fourth year is dissertation and nothing else, with writing folded into every prior term, so the structure is built against the classic stall. Electives come through NEXus, which lets you take doctoral nursing courses other schools teach.

What you give up. That flat rate still adds up to about $53,000 across 66 credits with no package on offer, and the degree names education rather than nursing science. Weigh the title carefully if a research faculty job is the goal.

A 3.5 minimum means the transcript carries the whole load. With no score to offset a weak undergraduate year, admission comes down to grades and finding a faculty member with a grant who wants you. April 1 is late enough to be a second chance.

Where it wins. Three years is the fast end of this page, and the college hosts a T32 fellowship in translational science on alcohol and HIV, so for that subject the funding is a named federal training slot rather than a hope. Public-school rate holds at $530.69.

What you give up. Some form of funding for everyone is a phrase covering a wide range, and what you actually get depends on a faculty member's grant carrying you. Full-time only, and 92 DNPs walk each year against four PhDs.

Georgia State asks for four campus days a year, two in fall and two in spring, which is a schedule a working charge nurse can actually hold. The demanding part is upstream, in choosing among six research areas.

Where it wins. You can walk out with a graduate certificate in public health or health literacy stapled to the PhD, and DNP holders get credit for prior coursework. Six named research areas sits at the top of the range here, so fit is easier to argue than at the two-area programs.

What you give up. Six research areas span more ground than the federal grant money underneath them, so you'll be building a study rather than joining one. Assistantships are limited, which leaves most students paying their own way through a 60-credit degree.

Rolling admission and a 3.0 floor mean the door opens whenever you're ready, and the 3.5-to-8-year span is what that flexibility costs. Getting in is the easy half; the dissertation is where that range gets decided.

Where it wins. It graduates 46 nursing PhDs a year, more than Columbia, Yale, NYU, UCSF and Boston College on this page put together, and it publishes a route for students who went ABD elsewhere: 25 quarter credits with verification. That lifeline is rarely written down.

What you give up. Budget past tuition. The four residencies add $5,680 taken virtually or $6,080 in person plus travel, on top of $50,020 for 61 credits, and the $5,000 grant covers roughly one residency. Research money you want, you'll be raising yourself.

Apply on a Tuesday, hear back within four weeks, start in fall or spring. UMSL puts a number on its turnaround, which matters when your employer's tuition benefit resets on a calendar you don't control.

Where it wins. Coursework runs 95 percent asynchronous, the most schedule-proof delivery on this page, and UMSL is the only program here that names machine learning among its research areas. The three-credit research residency pairs you with a faculty member, subject to advisor approval.

What you give up. Sixty-six credits at UMSL's rate runs about $66,600, the steepest tuition bill of any online program on this page, and Northern Colorado offers the same credit count for roughly $13,700 less. Check NC-SARA authorization for your state before you commit.

The no-GRE label here comes with a condition: the test is waived for master's-prepared applicants and still required if you're coming from a BSN. Check which lane you're in before you count this as a test-free application.

Where it wins. Classes run between 4:00 and 9:30 Eastern on a Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday, which is built for someone who works days, and eleven PhD graduates a year says the working-nurse model produces finishers instead of permanent students.

What you give up. The Conway fellowship that would cover the $78,660 sticker caps outside work at 10 hours a week and asks for a teaching commitment afterward. Funding and the evening schedule solve for opposite people, and only one of those people is funded.

Five to seven seats each fall reframes the whole application. With no test score to sort by, your fit letter is competing for one of about six chairs against everyone who saw the same open door.

Where it wins. The semester intensives can be attended entirely by Zoom, so you can finish this doctorate without ever driving to Johnson City. Nurse Faculty Loan Program grants are on the aid list too, which forgives debt for graduates who go teach.

What you give up. Tuition lands near $40,000 across the 60 credits, and the research areas are rural health and nursing education, full stop. A six-person cohort is intimate when your topics overlap and lonely when they don't.

Boston College calls GRE scores preferred but not required, which is the softest version of test-free on this page. Pair that wording with a 3.5 minimum and read optional as helpful if the number is good.

Where it wins. Funding covers tuition, fees and insurance for every full-time student rather than a competitive subset, which at $1,952 a credit across 46 credits is roughly $90,000 written off. Boston's hospital network supplies the clinical sites, so recruitment isn't a project you build alone.

What you give up. The money runs three years and the program runs four, so year four lands on you at $1,952 a credit. With four PhD graduates a year against 85 DNPs, you're a small population inside a school built around practice doctorates.