DNP Enrollment Hits 44,976 While Nursing PhD Enrollment Falls Again

What AACN’s 2025 Enrollment Survey Counted

AACN's 2025 survey puts DNP enrollment at 44,976 students. The figures come from AACN's annual survey, titled 2025-2026 Enrollment and Graduations in Baccalaureate and Graduate Programs in Nursing. AACN says it contains data reported by 998 schools of nursing, an 89.5% response rate. It is the standard national count of nursing students, and it is a count of enrolled students, not of applicants or of how selective any one school is.

Here are the three graduate levels AACN's release compares:

Master's growth matters for DNP applicants because the post-master's DNP is the route most schools offer. AACN's fact sheet lists post-master's DNP programs at 414 schools, post-baccalaureate programs at 322 and entry-level programs at 7. Those counts overlap, since one school can run more than one route. Our guide to doctoral nursing degrees carries the standing counts; this story covers what changed.

Key Dates For The AACN 2025 Enrollment Data

How Fast DNP Enrollment Is Growing

AACN says DNP programs "grew by 5.9% or 2,488 students, marking 22 years of continuous enrollment expansion." That is a faster year than the one before it. In June 2025, AACN reported DNP enrollment up 2.0%, or 936 students, to 42,767. The number of schools enrolling DNP students rose from 439 to 452 over the same two releases.

Enrollment and graduation moved in opposite directions. AACN's DNP fact sheet says graduates fell from 12,336 to 12,207, about 1% by our arithmetic. More students are in the pipeline than are coming out of it in a given year, which is what you'd expect while enrollment is still climbing and programs take years to finish. We don't read the small graduate dip as a trend; it is one year.

The fact sheet also lists more than 90 DNP programs in planning, so the supply of seats is still expanding. Whether it keeps pace with demand is what the next section covers. If you're comparing programs by accreditation and outcomes rather than size, our best DNP programs ranking and methodology show how we do it.

Eleven Straight Years Of Falling PhD Enrollment

AACN's release says enrollment in PhD nursing programs "declined for the 11th consecutive year, with a 3.05% decrease (127 students)." Since 2013 it has fallen 20.8%, from 5,145 to 4,077 students. AACN's PhD data page lists 144 PhD programs, plus one Doctor of Nursing Science, five Doctor of Education and eight combined PhD/DNP programs.

The decline has sped up. The 2025 release described a 0.5% drop; the 2026 release describes 3.1%. The survey counts students. It doesn't ask them why they chose one doctorate over another, so any single explanation for the slide is a guess, and we aren't offering one. What the numbers do show is that the research doctorate is shrinking while the practice doctorate grows, which changes who is available to teach and do research in nursing schools.

How Many Qualified Applications Schools Turned Away

AACN counts qualified applications that schools did not accept. It is careful to say these are applications, not applicants. A person who applies to four DNP programs and is turned away from all four is counted four times, and a person turned away from one school may have enrolled at another.

Together, DNP and PhD account for 10,359 qualified applications turned away from doctoral programs in the 2025 survey, a figure AACN's faculty fact sheet repeats. Those 9,859 DNP applications sit against 44,976 enrolled students, but the two numbers measure different things, and we can't turn them into an acceptance rate. AACN doesn't publish one in these releases.

The Faculty Shortage Behind The Turned-Away Numbers

AACN's explanation is capacity. Its faculty shortage fact sheet says schools did not accept all qualified applications "due to an insufficient number of faculty, clinical sites, classroom space, clinical preceptors, and budget constraints." Faculty is first on that list, and the October 2025 vacancy survey puts numbers on it: a national nurse faculty vacancy rate of 7.2%, with 1,588 full-time vacancies identified across 863 nursing schools.

Most of those jobs want a doctorate. AACN says 80.9% of the vacancies were faculty positions requiring or preferring a doctoral degree. The same fact sheet reports that doctorally prepared professors average 60.2 years old. The listing asks for a doctorate, not a particular one, so a PhD and a DNP can both be relevant; check each posting.

That is the link between this story's two halves. A shrinking PhD pipeline and a growing DNP pipeline both feed a shortage of doctoral-level teachers, and the shortage limits how many students schools can seat. That reasoning is ours, drawn from AACN's own numbers. AACN's pages don't say the PhD decline causes the vacancies.

Reading AACN’s Numbers Without Overreading Them

Three things in AACN's data need care before you quote it.

• The DNP base moved. The 2026 release says 5.9%, or 2,488 students, to 44,976. Subtracting gives a 2024 base of 42,488. AACN printed 42,767 in June 2025, so the earlier figure appears to have been revised by 279 students. That is our inference. AACN doesn't say it.
• The PhD base moved too. A drop of 127 to 4,077 implies 4,204 the year before, against 4,223 in the 2025 release.
• The decline count repeats. The 2025 release called the PhD slide the "eleventh consecutive year" and the 2026 release calls it the "11th." We use AACN's current wording and the 2013 endpoint, 5,145, which both releases share.

None of this changes the direction. DNP is up, PhD is down, and applications turned away are up. It does mean you should compare AACN's growth rates, not subtract one release from another. The source pages are linked at the bottom: the May 2026 release, the June 2025 release and the DNP fact sheet.

What The DNP And PhD Split Means For Your Degree Choice

The data doesn't tell you which degree to pick. It tells you where the seats are. DNP programs are being added and filled; research doctorate programs are enrolling fewer students each year. The degrees do different jobs, and our DNP vs PhD comparison covers that. The DNP is built for clinical practice, leadership and translating evidence into care. The PhD is built for original research.

If you're heading toward nurse anesthesia, the picture is narrower. AACN's counts cover DNP programs as a group and don't break out nurse anesthesia, so this survey can't tell you how crowded CRNA programs are. Our DNP vs DNAP guide covers that choice.

What This Means For DNP Students

For you as an applicant, the practical lesson is to apply to more than one program. AACN counted 9,859 qualified DNP applications turned away in the 2025 survey, for the capacity reasons AACN lists, not because the applications fell short. Being qualified doesn't guarantee a seat, and a school's capacity can matter as much as your file.

Growth in DNP enrollment doesn't loosen things for you by itself. It means more people are competing for seats that depend on faculty, clinical sites and preceptors. Ask each school how many students it enrolls, how it places you for clinical hours, and what happens if a placement falls through. Those answers tell you more than an enrollment headline.

Check accreditation before you rank schools. AACN's count of 452 schools enrolling DNP students says nothing about quality. Our CCNE accreditation guide explains what to verify, and a program that is still in planning or newly launched may not have completed accreditation review when you apply.

If you're a master's-prepared nurse, you're part of the pipeline AACN is counting: master's enrollment rose 6.8%, and the post-master's DNP is offered at 414 schools. If you're weighing a PhD, the funding and faculty picture is a separate conversation to have with each program, because AACN's survey measures enrollment and not support.