Best DNP Programs

Rochester metro

Best DNP Programs In Rochester 2026

Two accredited institutions that conferred three doctorates each, and file six distinct tracks between them.
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On this page

Key Takeaways

  1. 1

    Price will not narrow this list. The published in-state rates here sit inside a band of roughly 1.9 times, which is tight for a metro. That pushes the decision onto track, cohort size and who arranges the clinical placement.

  2. 2

    Every institution here is private. No public option means residency buys you nothing in this metro. A private institution charges one rate wherever you live, so an out-of-state applicant is on the same terms as a local one.

  3. 3

    Output is concentrated in one school. University of Rochester conferred 4 of the 7 DNP awards recorded across this metro, with St. John Fisher University next at 3. A number that lopsided says where the cohorts and the placement relationships are, which a ranking position does not.

  4. 4

    Nothing here is distance-flagged. No institution in this metro carries the federal distance-education flag. It records an institutional filing rather than how a program runs, so ask each school directly, but plan on being in the room.

Six Tracks, Six Doctorates: The Widest Choice And The Smallest Output On This Site

School-wide average graduate tuition in this metro, which excludes DNP add-on charges, runs from $19,692 a year in state at St. John Fisher University to $38,083 at University of Rochester, about 2 times apart, in the 2023-24 federal figures.

All two priced institutions are private, and each charges the same rate whatever your residency, so moving here or not does not change the bill.

University of Rochester conferred the most DNPs in the metro in the reporting year, 4, and charges the highest graduate rate here.

These are average tuition figures for full-time graduate students across each institution, not a DNP price. Some doctoral programs add a tuition differential on top, so ask each school for its DNP rate per credit before comparing.

The University of Rochester conferred 3 DNP awards in the reporting year and St. John Fisher University conferred 3. Between them they file six distinct DNP tracks, three each. One track per doctorate conferred is the highest ratio of choice to output anywhere on this site.

That is not a criticism, and it is worth understanding before applying. A program offering several population foci and graduating a handful of students a year is running small cohorts in each, which usually means close supervision and can also mean a track does not run in a given year. Ask which of the three are actually admitting before you build a plan around one.

How This Ranking Is Scored

Three published figures, weighted. Scores are relative to the 2 institutions on this page and to nothing else.

  1. 50%

    Published in-state graduate tuition

    Institution-level. Average annual tuition for full-time graduate students, 2023-24, from IPEDS. Not a DNP per-credit rate, not including program differentials, and not net of aid.

  2. 35%

    Established program

    Program-level. DNP conferrals in this CIP and award level in the reporting year, saturating at 25. Above that a program scores full marks and gains nothing further for size.

  3. 15%

    Institution-wide undergraduate completion

    Institution-level and undergraduate. The IPEDS 150%-of-normal-time rate for first-time, full-time bachelor's students.

Nothing is imputed. A program that does not publish a figure is scored on the ones it does publish, with the remaining weights renormalized; below 2 published figures it is listed without a position rather than ranked on a single number. Accreditation is a condition of appearing at all, not a factor that earns points. What the rubric cannot see.

The Best 2 DNP Programs In Rochester, Ranked

Ordered on the same three published figures the state guides use: in-state tuition, annual conferrals and completion rate. One row per institution, not per federal filing.

Each card shows what the institution publishes.

Ranked 1 of 2

St. John Fisher University

Rochester, NY

50 of 100
  • CCNE-accredited
  • Private nonprofit
  • Professional practice doctorate

3 DNP tracks at this institution, Adult health, Clinical Nurse Specialist, Nursing practice (general). Ranked once, on the largest.

Fisher runs two things at very different scales. The standard doctorate is a minimum of 33 credit hours of coursework. Beside it sits a dual-degree program that qualifies you as both an adult-gerontology acute care nurse practitioner and a nurse anesthetist, and that one is 103 credit hours over 36 months, in person, full-time only. There is no part-time version of it. Two credentials out of one sequence is rare, and the credit total states honestly what it costs: roughly three times the standard doctorate. None of the tracks carries a distance flag in the federal filing, so this is a Rochester program rather than a remote one.

Tuition
$19,692
In-state
Tuition
$19,692
Out-of-state
DNP Awards
3
Completion
74%
Undergraduate
About the tuition figures
School-wide graduate average, 2023-24. Excludes DNP add-on charges.

Scored on

  • Published in-state graduate tuition 100
  • Established program 0
  • Institution-wide undergraduate completion 0

Visit St. John Fisher University →

Ranked 2 of 2

University of Rochester

Rochester, NY

50 of 100
  • CCNE-accredited
  • Private nonprofit
  • Professional practice doctorate

3 DNP tracks at this institution, Clinical Nurse Leader, Family nurse practitioner, Pediatric. Ranked once, on the largest.

Rochester publishes a narrow window for its part-time post-master’s route, two to two and a half years, which is unusually tight for a part-time doctorate where four to six years is the norm elsewhere. Read that as a structured program rather than a self-paced one: the span is short because the sequence is fixed, not because the workload is light. It is a large private research university. School-wide average graduate tuition here, which excludes DNP add-on charges, sits in the highest tenth of the 306 accredited institutions that publish a rate, in the 2023-24 federal figures, and it is one rate whatever state you live in. Its federal filing carries no distance-education flag, so plan on being in Rochester rather than at a distance.

Tuition
$38,083
In-state
Tuition
$38,083
Out-of-state
DNP Awards
4
Completion
85%
Undergraduate
About the tuition figures
School-wide graduate average, 2023-24. Excludes DNP add-on charges.

Scored on

  • Published in-state graduate tuition 0
  • Established program 100
  • Institution-wide undergraduate completion 100

Visit University of Rochester →

What This Guide Counts As The Rochester Metro

This guide follows the Rochester, NY metropolitan statistical area. Both institutions report Rochester itself as their city. A second American city called Rochester, in Minnesota, has its own metropolitan area and no institution here is drawn from it.

Municipalities Included

  • Rochester, NY

Deliberately Not Included

  • Rochester, MN A separate metropolitan area in Minnesota with the same city name. This list is matched on the city and the state together, which matters more here than almost anywhere: stock photography and search results for "Rochester" return the Minnesota city as often as this one.
  • Buffalo and Syracuse, NY Separate upstate metropolitan areas about seventy miles either side of this one.
  • New York City The New York-Newark-Jersey City metropolitan area, three hundred miles southeast and covered by its own guide.

Choosing A DNP Program In Rochester

What studying in the Rochester metro changes. The questions that apply wherever you study are on the national ranking page.

St. John Fisher University and University of Rochester are the whole of the field in Rochester

St. John Fisher University and University of Rochester file their conferrals under a specialty classification rather than under Nursing Practice, so the credit total, the entry routes and the clinical hour requirement live on their own pages rather than in the federal columns this page ranks on. Ask them who arranges clinical placements, and take the licensure question to the New York board of nursing rather than to the school.

Who Licenses You In The Rochester Metro

Practice environment from AANP’s own state fact sheets, read 2026-09-08; AANP last revised the classification 05/2026. Boards from the NCSBN member directory, read 2026-09-08.

New York
Full Practice
New York State Board of Nursing

Every institution on this page sits in New York, so one board licenses all of them and AANP classifies the jurisdiction as full practice. The school does not grant practice authority and never has; the license and the certification behind it do.

The board detail, the full AANP definition and the license verification route are on the state guide: DNP programs in New York . AANP is reading state statute rather than issuing a federal designation, and statutes move each legislative session, so confirm with the board before you rely on it.

Shortage Areas, And The Debt Relief Attached To Them

HRSA designated primary-care Health Professional Shortage Areas, read 2026-09-08. These are state counts, not metro ones.

New York, designated areas
194
New York, of those rural
64

These figures cover New York in full rather than the Rochester metro specifically. HRSA publishes designations at the level of the individual area, and rolling them into a metro needs a county crosswalk this guide does not hold, so the state count is what is shown and it is shown as a state count. What follows from it still applies here, because eligibility never attached to a jurisdiction in the first place.

Both federal loan repayment routes open to advanced practice nurses require working at an approved site inside a designated area, and the area’s score sets funding priority when applications outrun the money: Nurse Corps Loan Repayment Program and NHSC Loan Repayment Program. HPSA primary-care scores run 0-25; funding priority for loan repayment follows the score.

In a metro that is mostly urban the practical consequence is that eligible sites are a smaller share of the employers you are likely to interview with than the state count suggests, and they are usually federally qualified health centers, public hospital systems and university clinics rather than private practices. Whether a particular employer counts is settled by the program rather than by the designation, so check the site before you take the job.

HRSA’s shortage-area data portal maps the designations to the address. Paying for a DNP covers the routes that do not depend on where you practice, and the state guide breaks the designations down further: New York.

Studying From Outside The Rochester Metro

the Rochester metro holds 2 accredited doctorates and none of the measured ones carries the federal distance-education flag. That flag is an institutional filing rather than a description of any one program, so the local field may reach further than it looks, but a program run elsewhere is the route to check first. Either way it turns on one thing this site cannot answer for you.

Authority to enroll a distance student is set per institution and per state, and the federal flag this page counts records delivery rather than permission, so only the school can answer it. Ask two things before tuition enters the conversation: whether the program can enroll a resident of the Rochester metro this cycle, and whether it will place you for supervised clinical hours near where you live.

Which Rochester Option Fits Your Situation

Each of these routes to a published figure or a named institution. None is a recommendation, and none is a statement about whether a school will admit you.

If you hold a bachelor's: University of Rochester states that route

University of Rochester's own pages name a bachelor's entry. Others in Rochester may take bachelor's entrants too: this site records a route only where the school states it, so an absent name means unread rather than closed.

If residency is out of reach: the private rate does not depend on it

A private institution charges one figure wherever you live, so without residency the comparison is against the out-of-state public rate. In Rochester the cheapest published rate in the state belongs to one of its 2 private institutions.

What The Figures On This Page Are

Tuition is the institution’s published annual graduate rate, not a per-credit price and not a program total. Awards are conferrals in the reporting year. Completion is the federal undergraduate rate, the weakest input in the model, and no federal series reports DNP completion. Wages are the metropolitan cut of the federal survey, a different survey area from the state one. How this site scores programs sets out each input and its weight in full.

Frequently Asked Questions

How many DNP programs are there in Rochester?

2 institutions in the Rochester metro hold CCNE accreditation for the Doctor of Nursing Practice. This guide counts the Rochester, NY metropolitan statistical area rather than the city limits, so the figure includes institutions in 1 municipalities.

What counts as the Rochester metro on this page?

The Rochester, NY metropolitan statistical area. In practice that means these municipalities: Rochester, NY. Places deliberately left out are listed on this page with the reason.

Is it cheaper to study for a DNP in Rochester than online?

Neither is reliably cheaper. Published in-state tuition at a public institution is usually the lowest figure available to someone who qualifies for it, and distance programs charge a single rate to everyone regardless of where they live. Which comes out lower depends entirely on whether you hold in-state status somewhere, so compare the published rates rather than the format.

Do these figures include fees and clinical costs?

No. Every tuition figure on this page is the published rate an institution reports to the federal government, which excludes fees, health insurance, textbooks and the travel a clinical placement can require. Treat it as a floor for comparison between institutions rather than a total cost of attendance.

Related Pages

Sources

  1. 1 CCNE Directory Of Accredited Programs Which institutions hold accreditation.
  2. 2 IPEDS Published tuition, conferrals and completion.
  3. 3 Metro Definition The Rochester, NY metropolitan statistical area, rolled up to the municipalities listed above. Institutions are matched on city and state.

Every federal figure on this site is read from the administering agency’s own page, never from a secondary aggregator, and the reading date is recorded beside it.

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Schools pay to appear in these listings. They are separate from our rankings, which no school can pay to change.