Best DNP Programs

Standards

How This Site Handles Data

Seven rules. Each one is enforced somewhere a person cannot forget it, a required input, a pre-release check, or a single file every figure has to come from. Rules that live only on a methodology page are decoration.

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  1. One Wage Source, And It Is Named On Every Figure

    Every dollar figure on this site comes from the federal occupational wage survey, currently the BLS OEWS, May 2025 release. No salary aggregators, no job-board averages, no self-reported ranges. The figures live in a single data file with the survey release stamped on it, so a restatement is one edit rather than a hunt through prose, and no number can be typed directly into a sentence, which is how invented figures survive.

  2. A Figure Cannot Be Published Without A Live Citation

    The component that renders a large figure takes its source as a required input. A number with nowhere to check it will not build. Those links are re-fetched before every release and checked against what the page still says, not merely for whether the URL resolves, a link that returns a valid page which no longer carries the claim is the failure this catches, and it is far more common than a dead link.

  3. The Wage Survey Classifies By Occupation, Never By Credential

    There is no federal wage series for the Doctor of Nursing Practice and there will not be one. Every figure here covers everyone working in an occupation, whatever degree they hold. Where this site compares two occupations, it says plainly that the gap measures the work rather than the diploma. Any page presenting an occupation wage as "what a DNP earns" would be misreading its own source.

  4. Every Count States The Noun It Counts

    The accreditor and the federal survey count different things, so this site names which one every figure comes from. CCNE lists 394 institutions holding an accredited DNP. The federal survey files 517 doctoral nursing records, one per program per award level, of which 439 join to an accredited institution and 307 distinct institutions remain once those filings are collapsed. 301 of them publish enough figures to be ranked and 83 publish none at all. No page here prints one of those numbers without saying which it is.

  5. No Program Is Described As Fully Online On A Federal Flag Alone

    The federal distance-education marker is set per program and routinely marks programs that require campus attendance for orientation, intensives or skills assessment. Sibling research in this portfolio found that many programs carrying the flag require at least one on-campus visit, and that "immersion" often means a clinical placement rather than a campus week. Delivery format is verified against the institution before it is described, or it is not described.

  6. Accreditation Comes From The Accreditor

    A program that has lost accreditation does not update its own marketing, so a school's claim about its own status is evidence pointing the wrong way. Accreditation on this site is read from the accreditor's published directory, with the retrieval date recorded alongside it. One accreditor is treated as authoritative at this award level; a second body accredits nine clinical doctorates against several hundred programs at lower levels, and folding it in would add a rounding error dressed as a second opinion.

  7. One Row Per Institution, And Every Figure Counted The Same Way

    The federal survey files one record per program per award level, so a single university can hold seven. Tuition and completion are published per institution rather than per program, so any list ordered on them is collapsed to one row per school before it is scored, otherwise the same school appears seven times at seven identical prices. Where a school files more than one record the page says so. Every statistic printed above a ranking is computed over the same collapsed set the ranking renders, and a gate fails the build when it is not.

  8. Structural Requirements Are Quoted From The Body That Sets Them

    The 1,000-hour post-baccalaureate supervised clinical practice hours, across the whole program of study is the one requirement that holds at every institution, and it is quoted from the body that publishes it rather than paraphrased from a school's page. Credit hours, program length and entry route are not federal data at all. They exist only in program materials, so they are reported per program with the pending cases left visibly pending rather than filled in by inference.

Rankings Are Not Published Yet

There is no scoring model on this page because there is nothing scored yet. When program rankings ship, the factors and their weights will be published here before the rankings go live, along with what each factor is measured from and what happens to a program when a factor is unknown.

Corrections are welcome and get made. If a figure here disagrees with its source, the figure is wrong.