307 institutions with a
CCNE-accredited Doctor of Nursing Practice, ordered on three published
figures. One row per institution, not per federal filing. Several schools file seven. Accreditation is a condition of appearing
here at all rather than something a program earns points for.
Accreditation is the entry condition.All 307 institutions ranked below hold CCNE accreditation for the DNP, so none earns points for holding it and none appears here without it.
2
Three published figures decide the order.DNP conferrals carry 50% of the score, published in-state tuition 30% and institution-wide undergraduate completion 20%.
3
The tuition figure is annual, not total.It is the institution’s published yearly graduate rate, not a per-credit price and not what a DNP costs end to end — no page here multiplies it out.
4
A different question gives a different list.46% of these programs are delivered at a distance. The affordability list reorders this same set on different weights; the online and leadership lists narrow the population first and then reweight it.
How This Ranking Is Scored
Three published figures, weighted. Scores are relative to the
307 institutions on this page and to nothing
else.
50%
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.
30%
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.
20%
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 DNP Programs In 2026, Ranked
Scores are relative to these 307 institutions. A program
near the top is not "the best DNP". It is the one that comes
out ahead on the three things the federal record actually publishes.
What the rubric can and cannot see.
Each card shows what the federal record publishes for that program,
how the three factors combined into its score, and, where one has
been written, what the school’s own pages say the program
covers and who it suits.
UTMB draws a hard line between its routes. The BSN-to-DNP nurse anesthesia program is 112 credit hours over an intensive 36 months, which is roughly triple a post-master’s load and the honest price of becoming a CRNA. The executive leadership track works on a different clock: national certification, whether NEA-BC, NE-BC, CNML or CENP, must already be complete before the first practicum course begins, so it is a doctorate for nurses who have finished credentialing, not one that credentials you. Practitioner tracks let you build hours in acute settings, outpatient settings or both. Most post-master’s students accumulate their remaining 500 hours through the scholarly project rather than direct patient care.
Texas Tech keeps a public archive of its DNP projects, year by year, and it is the most revealing thing the college publishes. Graduates in it work as pediatric intensive care nurses, adult-gerontology acute care practitioners and directors of critical care services, with projects aimed at problems like burnout on level IV neonatal units. That is the range the program actually supports, described by the people who finished it. It is a health sciences center in Lubbock rather than a nursing school inside a general campus, so the faculty around you are all in health professions, and West Texas geography shapes where students end up doing clinical work.
2 DNP tracks at this
institution, Family nurse practitioner, Nursing practice (general). Ranked once, on the largest.
Cizik School of Nursing sorts applicants by who they already are. The post-master’s tracks are written for practicing nurse practitioners and clinical nurse specialists, and for nurses moving into leadership rather than deeper into clinical work. The BSN-to-DNP routes are described as built for nurses who are still working, and the adult-gerontology acute care track within them prepares you to be the provider for adolescents and adults with complex illness. That is hospital medicine rather than primary care. If you are choosing between a leadership doctorate and an advanced practice one, this is a school that keeps the two visibly separate rather than folding leadership coursework into a clinical track and calling it both.
Nebraska publishes its admission floor instead of leaving you to infer it: a 3.0 GPA for full admission across all three entry routes, with applicants between 2.5 and 2.9 eligible for provisional consideration. That is worth knowing before an application fee. Entry is by BSN-to-DNP for nurses with an accredited bachelor’s, MSN-to-DNP for those with an accredited master’s, or a post-graduate track for holders of a master’s or doctorate, and the accrediting bodies accepted for the prior degree are named rather than assumed. Graduates move into advanced clinical roles as nurse practitioners, clinical nurse specialists and nurse midwives, or into nursing leadership. The school treats those as parallel destinations rather than one being the fallback.
Walden is the largest DNP program in the country and is explicit about the arithmetic that catches people out. Completion needs 1,000 post-BSN practicum hours with at least 400 at doctoral level, and a student admitted with fewer than 600 documented hours takes up to eight extra credits to close the gap, and one credit carries 80 practicum hours. Students already holding APRN licensure receive prior credit and complete at least 500. Coursework and the project run online on your own schedule, but the practicum happens in a physical healthcare setting, and the university runs a dedicated field office to help students find one. It also states what most online programs leave out: practicum brings travel, onboarding fees, per-quarter fees and liability insurance.
UAMS is really three programs with different audiences. The nurse anesthesia route is a 36-month, full-time, entry-to-practice plan of study that takes BSN- or master’s-prepared critical-care nurses to CRNA. Full-time means what it says, so it is not a degree to fit around a roster. The post-master’s leadership track is scoped to applicants already holding a master’s in nursing administration or an APRN specialty. And nurses already licensed and certified as an APRN can use a post-BSN or post-master’s certificate track to add a second population focus, which is a narrower and more useful thing than a general doctorate if you want to practice with a different patient group. Admission runs twice a year: 1 March for August, 1 September for January.
Carolina asks you to choose a pathway before a specialty, and publishes three: health care leadership and administration, BSN-to-DNP nurse practitioner areas, and MSN-to-DNP. The coursework spans advanced practice, leadership and practice-based inquiry, ending in an evidence-based DNP project, with 1,000 practice hours inside the credit total. What sets it apart is that the specialty entry expectations are written down rather than implied: pediatric primary care wants roughly six months of full-time RN work in a neonatal, pediatric or child-serving community setting, and the psychiatric-mental health track wants six months in acute or community psychiatric and substance-use care. If you are switching populations rather than deepening the one you know, those are the sentences that decide whether to apply now or work another year first.
Florida runs two routes into the doctorate and gates them differently. The BSN-to-DNP is built around online coursework for nurses moving up from the bedside. The MSN-to-DNP is open only to applicants holding a master’s in nursing and an active Florida APRN license, and that condition settles the question for most people before anything else does: if you already practice in Florida as an APRN, that is your route, and if you don’t, you’re applying to the longer one. If cohort size and an established placement network matter to you, Gainesville’s conferral volume is the argument for it. School-wide average graduate tuition here, which excludes DNP add-on charges, sits in the middle third of the 306 accredited institutions that publish a rate, in the 2023-24 federal figures, and the out-of-state rate is about 2.5 times the in-state one, so residency matters a great deal.
Madison solves the problem that stalls more doctorates than coursework does. It runs a Clinical Placement Unit whose job is to secure placements in your population area and make sure the hours needed for certification and graduation are actually obtained, because staff and faculty find the practicum so you do not have to. In a market where preceptors are scarce, that is worth more than any figure on this card, and it is the opposite of schools that leave students to source their own. The scholarly project is organized around the population you intend to serve, whether pediatric primary care, psychiatric-mental health or adult-gerontology acute care. Graduates are prepared for hospitals, intensive care, emergency departments, urgent care, surgical suites and specialty settings. It also caps waivable credits at 18, which sets a floor on how much coursework an MSN-prepared applicant still has to take.
LSU’s health sciences center publishes its DNP as course tables rather than description, including a distinct adult-gerontology acute care sequence, so what the program emphasizes has to be read off the curriculum rather than a summary. One thing it does state plainly is that clinical hours and the three Ps, meaning advanced pathophysiology, pharmacology and physical assessment, are verified at admission rather than assumed, so applicants carrying credits from an earlier master’s should expect them to be audited before enrollment rather than after. This is a small, health-professions-only campus of 2,750 people, which means a cohort you will recognize rather than a faculty you queue to see.
FSU is built for nurses who intend to keep working. Every track runs online, full or part-time, with only minimal on-campus skill practice and testing, though the college is candid that most courses carry a synchronous Zoom component, so evenings are not entirely yours. The executive health systems leadership track is fully online and part-time, and admits experienced nurses holding an MSN, a qualifying master’s, or in some cases a BSN. There is also a post-master’s route for acute care practitioners moving into adult-gerontology. One provision is unique here: a serving preceptor can claim a waiver of six credit hours for every 300 hours of precepting completed, which turns work you may already be doing into progress on the degree.
UCF states its executive track precisely: 42 credit hours of online asynchronous instruction, two required virtual DNP intensives a year, and 1,000 post-baccalaureate clinical hours. It also admits the thing most online programs gloss: the DNP project itself requires in-person clinical hours, so fully remote it is not. There is deliberately no full-time option for the nurse executive track, because the college assumes those students are already working full-time, which tells you exactly who it is designed for: serving managers, not people stepping out of practice. The family and adult-gerontology acute care tracks run mixed-mode with reduced on-campus seat time, a middle setting between the executive track’s near-total flexibility and a conventional campus program. The family practitioner route runs 73 credits against the executive track’s 42, so the track page is what to compare on rather than the program page.
Memphis runs one of the most concentrated nursing doctorates in the country. Set doctoral output against the size of the institution and this campus ranks fourth of the 307 accredited institutions on this site, because eighty-four DNP graduates a year come out of a place enrolling barely three thousand people, nearly all of them in health professions. There is no undergraduate arts college here for nursing to sit beside. For a working nurse that usually shows up as faculty who teach at doctoral level as their day job rather than as an overload, and as a cohort big enough that courses run when the catalog says they will. Requirements are published per track rather than for the degree, so the track page is where the credit and practicum totals live.
UCSF was first in the University of California system to run a post-master’s entry to the doctorate, and that route is seven quarters, hybrid, combining online learning with selected in-person immersions. The bachelor’s entry route is hybrid too, with the majority of courses online. Quarters rather than semesters is the detail to plan around, because a quarter calendar moves faster and the breaks fall in different places from the schedule most employers assume. This is a graduate health sciences campus of about 3,000 people with no undergraduate college attached, and against that size it confers nursing doctorates at one of the higher rates in the country.
Wilmington offers five concentrations delivered in a flexible asynchronous online format, and asynchronous here means no fixed class times at all, which is rarer than the word "online" usually implies and the single reason to look here if your roster moves. The family nurse practitioner concentration is aimed at nurses seeking advanced practice skills to deliver primary care across the lifespan, while the nurse executive leadership concentration is 36 credit hours, completable in as few as five semesters, and written for nurses already on a leadership trajectory rather than those hoping to start one. Overall completion runs anywhere from five to fourteen semesters depending on how heavily you study, which the school publishes rather than burying.
Irvine’s post-master’s DNP is a two-year, primarily online commitment written for working professionals, and the family nurse practitioner track is the heavy one at 98 units and 1,020 hours of clinical practice, though California counts in quarter units, so the load is less alarming than it looks. The useful provision is that the clinical hours attached to the scholarly project can be completed at your own place of employment or another agency suited to the project, which removes the hardest logistical problem in the degree for anyone already working somewhere appropriate. Cohorts are small and the school says it turns away qualified applicants. Nurses employed on a career appointment within the University of California system can apply for a $10,000 scholarship.
Charlotte runs two concentrations that could hardly be less alike. The post-master’s DNP prepares health-system and organizational leaders, explicitly including non-APRNs alongside practicing APRNs, to lead through translating evidence into practice, so a nurse manager without a clinical master’s is not excluded. The BSN-to-DNP in nurse anesthesia across the lifespan is the opposite proposition: taught on campus in partnership with Atrium Health, a hospital-embedded clinical residency rather than something to fit around a job. Clinical hours are shaped to your primary area of interest and the specialty competencies. The university also warns that some states do not permit its online delivery or out-of-state practicum, which is the licensure question to settle before applying. It also publishes its student handbook openly, which is the fastest way to see what the program expects of you before you apply.
USF attaches a geographic condition to the degree that decides it for a lot of applicants: a minimum of 31 credits including at least eight practicum credits and four project credits, all of which must be completed in Florida. If you do not live there, that decides it before anything else does. The plan is lock-step, so the sequence is fixed rather than assembled around your schedule, which is predictable if you want a known end date, inflexible if your work pattern shifts. Practicum hours directly support the DNP project and can include direct patient care or immersion experiences approved by the program director. Both entry routes are open, and the adult-gerontology acute care concentration evaluates prior clinical experience case by case rather than against a fixed threshold.
Maryland’s scale buys specialization most schools cannot staff. Alongside family practice it runs acute care pediatrics and neonatal tracks aimed at genuinely different jobs: acute care pediatric practitioners are hired into pediatric intensive care, inpatient pediatrics, cardiovascular surgery units and emergency departments, while neonatal practitioners go into level II, III and IV neonatal intensive care. The family track deliberately spreads practicum hours across women’s health, adult, geriatric and pediatric populations rather than concentrating them. The school also names the background it wants: emergency, pediatric cardiac surgery ICU, neurosurgical ICU or hematology-oncology experience. That is a clearer signal than a GPA floor. A Conway Scholarship covers half of in-state tuition, fees and books for those who qualify. Its pathways page publishes 37 credits for a nurse already practicing as an APRN against 80 to 93 for bachelor’s entry.
Fullerton asks for one commitment that decides it for a lot of working nurses: students must be available all day on Fridays for the entirety of the program. The format is hybrid, on-site and online, so that standing Friday is the practical constraint to weigh against a rota before anything else. Admission requires a master’s from a regionally accredited institution and a nursing specialty, and the indirect care track narrows that further to a master’s in nursing leadership, administration, education or community health, so this is a doctorate for nurses who have already specialized. Clinical hours can be completed at your own place of employment. The program has been run by the CSUF School of Nursing since 2023, its predecessor consortium having graduated a final cohort in 2024.
FIU’s DNP leans psychiatric, and its practice sites make that plain: community mental health centers, crisis centers, psychiatric clinics and hospital units, correctional health, and private practice. Correctional health in particular is a setting few nursing schools name, and the placements you do are what you end up competent to handle afterwards. The provision worth knowing if you live anywhere else in Florida is that students in the online specialties may complete clinicals beyond the university’s own service area of Monroe, Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach. Several Florida publics hold their students inside a catchment. This one says in writing that it does not. Its college publishes a plan of study per specialty rather than one for the degree.
It is a health-professions campus of about three thousand in Charleston, and federal records flag the DNP for distance study, so the program reaches well beyond the Lowcountry. It also confers doctorates at a high rate for its size, thirteenth of the 311 institutions in this dataset measured as awards against total enrollment, which says the nursing doctorate is central to that campus rather than one program among many. School-wide average graduate tuition here, which excludes DNP add-on charges, sits in the middle third of the 306 accredited institutions that publish a rate, in the 2023-24 federal figures.
East Carolina runs five DNP concentrations: nurse anesthesia, adult-gerontology primary care, family nurse practitioner, nursing leadership, and a post-master’s route for APRNs who are already certified. That post-master’s route is 36 credit hours, split 18 core, 9 project and 9 electives, and it is part-time by design so you can keep working through it. Leadership is part-time only, with a single 1 May deadline and a fall start. The detail to know before you apply is that the clinical hours attached to your DNP project are not a fixed number. ECU calculates them from the hours you already logged during your master’s, so two students in one cohort can owe different amounts. You will need an unrestricted RN license in North Carolina or a compact state, and the GRE is waived if you hold an MSN.
Florida Atlantic splits the DNP by entry credential. The full-time BSN-to-DNP prepares family, adult-gerontology primary care and psychiatric-mental health practitioners. The post-master’s route runs part-time over eight semesters for APRNs who are already certified, covering leadership, clinical scholarship, nursing theory, cultural competence, population health, strategic healthcare management and evaluation. A minimum of 1,000 clinical hours culminates in a project mapped to the 2021 AACN Essentials. Delivery is four separate choices rather than one: live on campus, synchronous over Zoom, fully asynchronous, or hybrid. That matters because most schools offer a single mode and call it flexible. Its college also charges a per-credit fee on nursing courses on top of tuition, so the published annual rate is not the whole bill.
Amherst answers up front the question most online programs leave you to find out late: it cannot accept DNP students who live in Alabama, Minnesota, New York, Oregon or Washington. If you are in one of those five states, that settles it before you compare anything else. For everyone else the coursework runs entirely online, the clinical side is done through internships where you already are, and the degree ends in a project that puts research evidence to work in a practice setting you choose. The post-baccalaureate route concentrates on psychiatric mental health, so this is a doctorate pointed at one population rather than a general one. You can also take a master’s in nursing on the way through instead of finishing with nothing in between.
North Florida frames its DNP for nurses ready to move from clinical expertise into influence, with emphasis on evidence-based practice, organizational and systems leadership, health policy and quality improvement rather than on adding a clinical population. It is delivered fully online with faculty engagement built into each course, and the post-MSN track admits twice a year, autumn and spring. One change is worth planning around: from autumn 2026 the post-MSN route requires full-time enrollment at nine credit hours a term, closing the part-time option many working nurses rely on. Anyone weighing this program should confirm which cohort they would join, because the version described today and the version starting in 2026 ask for different things. Its nurse anesthesia track is accredited by the COA rather than CCNE, a separate accreditation claim from the rest of the degree.
Utah publishes two MS-to-DNP timetables and what separates them is where you did your master’s. Come from another institution and it is 35 credit hours, five semesters full time starting in fall or seven part time starting in spring. Finish a master’s at Utah recently and the same degree is 30 credits, three semesters full time starting in summer. Either way the clinical requirement is 480 hours. The college counts every clinical, residency and practicum hour you earned during your MSN toward the 1,000 post-baccalaureate hours the degree is built on, so what you still owe depends on what you already banked rather than on a fixed number.
Alabama sets clinical hours by concentration rather than by degree, and the spread is wide. The college publishes 1,080 to 1,620 post-baccalaureate hours depending on which concentration you pick, against 540 for a post-master’s entry. A gap that size between two concentrations at one school is worth pinning down before you apply, because at the top end it is most of a year of placement. There is also a transfer rule that can buy time: the direct care core, meaning advanced pathophysiology, advanced physical assessment and advanced pharmacology, may transfer if you took those courses with a B or better within five years of applying. Five years is the part people miss. The doctorate carries no distance flag federally, so plan on Tuscaloosa.
Tennessee’s nurse anesthesia program has been approved by the Council on Accreditation to award the doctorate as the entry credential since June 2019, which matters because the profession moved to doctoral entry and schools converted at different times. The licensing condition rewards a close read too: you need an unencumbered registered nurse license in your state of residence, not simply somewhere. And if you finished a graduate degree within the past two years, one of your rating forms has to come from a faculty member in that program, so references from work alone will not do. Knoxville confers one of the larger numbers of nursing doctorates in the country, so the cohort is substantial rather than a handful.
Missouri publishes a hard ceiling on transfer credit for its post-graduate certificates: a faculty advisor may recommend up to three credit hours from an accredited master’s or DNP advanced practice program, and no more. Three hours is one course. If you are shopping post-graduate certificates on the assumption that prior graduate work will shorten the path, this is a school where it barely will, and knowing that early saves an application. It is a large public university in Columbia conferring around forty nursing doctorates a year, so the program itself is substantial even though the transfer policy is tight. Its federal filing carries no distance-education flag, so plan on being in Columbia rather than at a distance.
Reno’s school of nursing secures your clinical placements for you, which removes the single biggest obstacle in an online doctorate, and then adds the exception in a footnote: you place yourself for the residency component. Both halves matter, and the second is the one to plan around. The program is fully online and open nationwide. Two pathways run, one from a bachelor’s leading to clinical education leadership or nurse executive work, and one from a master’s for nurses already practicing as advanced practitioners or already prepared as educators. If you take the clinical nurse leader master’s here first, a number of its core courses transfer into the doctorate. School-wide average graduate tuition here, which excludes DNP add-on charges, sits in the cheapest tenth of the 306 accredited institutions that publish a rate, in the 2023-24 federal figures, and the out-of-state rate is about 4 times the in-state one, so residency matters a great deal.
Liberty dropped graduate biostatistics as an admission requirement for its post-master’s DNP, and that removal is worth knowing because biostatistics is the prerequisite that most often sends applicants back to take a course before they can apply anywhere. If yours is missing or stale, this is a route that does not stop you at the door. Alongside it the university runs a post-BSN to DNP with a family nurse practitioner concentration. Liberty is an unusually large institution, over a hundred thousand students, and it confers around fifty-four nursing doctorates a year, so the program is substantial in absolute terms while being small relative to the university around it.
Birmingham confers 178 nursing doctorates a year, which puts it seventh out of the 311 accredited institutions on this site. Scale matters here in a practical way: a program that size runs its courses when the catalog says it will, and the faculty teach at doctoral level as their job rather than as an overload. Teaching happens alongside the university’s own academic medical center, so clinical exposure runs from pediatrics through geriatrics and includes level one trauma care without students being sent to a partner hospital across town. The doctorate carries no distance flag in its federal filing, so plan on Birmingham. School-wide average graduate tuition here, which excludes DNP add-on charges, sits in the lowest fifth of the 306 accredited institutions that publish a rate, in the 2023-24 federal figures.
5 DNP tracks at this
institution, Adult health, Family nurse practitioner, Nursing practice (general), Pediatric, Psychiatric-mental health NP. Ranked once, on the largest.
Cincinnati builds its DNP curriculum around evidence-based practice, quality improvement, policy, informatics and leadership, and its family track is explicitly aimed at both national certification exams, the ANCC’s FNP-BC and the AANP’s. The pediatric acute care programs prepare nurses for fast-paced clinical settings and family-centerd care. Two structural details are worth knowing before you plan around it. From spring 2027, advanced health assessment students must complete a three-day on-campus immersion and demonstrate competency before beginning practicum, which for a distance-flagged program means three days in Ohio. And each practicum requires at least two DNP project team meetings, so supervision is scheduled rather than left to you to arrange.
Kansas sizes each DNP specialty separately and publishes the numbers next to each other, which makes the comparison unusually easy to make. The post-master’s completion route is 31 to 34 credits, online, two years of full-time study. Psychiatric mental health is 67 credits over three years and hybrid rather than fully online. Executive leadership sits between them at 63. All of them carry the same 1,000 practice hours. There is one application deadline for every specialty except nurse-midwifery, 1 June for a fall start, so the calendar is simpler here than at schools running rolling admission. Midwifery is also where the funding sits: the MIDWIVES KAN project offers up to $25,000 a year to full-time nurse-midwifery students from diverse backgrounds.
Montana State runs the two advanced practice roles most schools leave out alongside the usual ones: nurse-midwifery as well as nurse practitioner, with family and psychiatric mental health as the practitioner options. Bachelor’s entry is 82 credits for either practitioner focus and 74 to 82 for midwifery. The post-master’s route is 37. Transfer credit is capped by whether your earlier graduate work finished: 9 credits from a degree you did not complete against 30 from one you did, which is a sharper distinction than most schools draw. The application window is narrow and annual, opening 15 September and closing 15 December for the following fall. If your clinical hours will happen in Montana, you need Montana licensure to do them.
Greensboro publishes the arithmetic that decides whether a post-master’s doctorate is worth starting. The post-master’s DNP runs 30 credits and 1,000 practicum hours, and the hours you already logged in a master’s count toward that total, which is how a full-time student finishes in four semesters, roughly 15 months, entering in the fall and ending the fall after. If your master’s practicum fell short, the school says you make up the difference here rather than waving it through. The nurse anesthesia concentration is a different commitment: 107 credits across nine semesters and 36 months, a May start, and graduate and clinical clock hours averaging about 35 a week. School-wide average graduate tuition here, which excludes DNP add-on charges, sits in the cheapest tenth of the 306 accredited institutions that publish a rate, in the 2023-24 federal figures, and the out-of-state rate is about 3.5 times the in-state one, so residency matters a great deal.
Villanova is blunt about what its nurse anesthesia track takes: more than 2,000 hours of clinical experience and no fewer than 700 cases, and the college states plainly that the average weekly commitment may run to 60 hours or more. That is a full-time job with a doctorate attached, and it is the frankest statement of the trade any school on this site publishes. Rotations move you deliberately from simple to complex cases across several sites rather than keeping you in one. The post-master’s track is a different proposition: it starts in early summer with an on-campus residency, so your first commitment is a fixed date rather than a rota you can negotiate.
Kentucky runs six specialties inside one BSN-to-DNP option and publishes a plan of study for each rather than one timetable for the degree. Full time is three years. If that will not fit around a roster there are five-year part-time plans and a modified four-year plan built specifically for nurses already working in direct care. Executive leadership sits apart from the clinical specialties with its own full- and part-time sequences. Your specialty decides your certification board as much as your coursework: family primary care goes to ANCC or AANP, both pediatric routes to the PNCB, and executive leadership to the ANCC nurse executive advanced exam or the AONE certified-in-executive-nursing-practice exam.
Gulf Coast publishes four separate DNP curricula and the credit totals are nothing alike, so the number that matters is the one attached to your entry point. The BSN-to-DNP nurse practitioner route is 81 credits, full time or part time. If you already hold an MSN with an advanced practice focus, you finish in 36 credits over five full-time semesters. Nurse anesthesiology is a different proposition again: 112 credits across nine continuous full-time semesters, 36 months end to end, and it wants a full year of ICU experience behind you before classes start in the summer. CRNAs who already hold a master’s take a 37-credit version over six part-time semesters instead. Anesthesiology is also the one route with a standing campus commitment, once a week from that first summer through to graduation.
New Hampshire is precise about the gap most schools leave vague. The post-master’s doctorate is 33 credits and 500 practicum hours, counted toward 1,000 documented advanced practice hours in which up to 500 from your master’s may be included. Arrive with fewer and there is a named remedy rather than a negotiation: a clinical practicum course carrying up to 250 hours, taken under the DNP director and repeatable once. Admission prefers a 3.50 graduate average, above the usual floor, and the application asks you to identify a scholarly inquiry from your own practice. Bachelor’s entry runs 60 credits for the clinical nurse leader route through to 80 for the family and psychiatric practitioner tracks. The degree ends in a publishable paper and a presented project.
Arizona State runs its DNP majors at 84 credit hours and publishes the practicum inside that total rather than alongside it. The primary care pediatric track puts 13 of those credits, 585 clock hours, into practicum in a community setting. The acute care pediatric track goes considerably further at 1,170 practicum hours, which the college notes exceeds what the degree standard requires, and 600 of those must be direct patient care supervised by a nurse practitioner or a physician preceptor. If you already hold a master’s, up to 30 credit hours can be carried across, though that needs sign-off from your supervisory committee and the Graduate College rather than being automatic. Delivery is not uniform either: the education major is online while the pediatric majors sit at Downtown Phoenix.
6 DNP tracks at this
institution, Family nurse practitioner, Maternal/Child Health and Neonatal Nurse/Nursing, Nursing administration, Nursing practice (general), Psychiatric-mental health NP, Registered nursing (general). Ranked once, on the largest.
Creighton is unusually direct about what the degree costs you in time. Its own page warns that full-time students may struggle to hold down full-time work, and it puts the scholarly project at roughly 30 to 40 hours a semester on top of coursework, which is the kind of number most schools leave you to discover after you enroll. Coursework across all tracks and specializations runs online, full time or part time. Nurse anesthesia is the exception in scale rather than in format: 2,250 clinical hours spread across large metropolitan hospitals, rural and specialty hospitals and community clinics, so the rotations are deliberately not all in one kind of setting.
Murray State publishes its curricula course by course, with the credit weight and the clinical hours attached to each one, which is a level of detail most schools keep behind an advising appointment. The post-master’s route shows what that buys you: the doctoral project runs across three sequential courses carrying 180 clinical hours apiece, so 540 hours accumulate through the project itself rather than in separate placements. Bachelor’s entry splits into nurse anesthesia and family practice, and the family sequence front-loads assessment and diagnostics before primary care clinical courses at 180 hours each. If you want to know what a semester will actually demand before you commit, this is a school that has already written it down.
Southern Illinois Edwardsville quantifies the experience requirement instead of leaving it vague: a year of full-time work, or its part-time equivalent, which the school puts at 1,872 hours, completed before you start the first specialization clinical course. It also wants your registered nurse license current in the state where you intend to do the practicum, not wherever you happen to be licensed now. The post-master’s application asks for a personal statement naming a doctoral project idea that is patient or practice focused, so you are expected to arrive with a problem in mind rather than find one later. Priority deadlines run 1 February for summer, 1 June for fall and 1 November for spring, and every doctoral student attends an immersion in the first days of the fall semester.
Huntsville runs two ways in and they suit different people. The post-master’s route builds on advanced practice knowledge you already hold and is aimed at sharpening clinical or administrative work rather than starting it. The post-bachelor’s route carries you from a BSN through the MSN and on to the doctorate as one sequence rather than two applications. What decides whether the program fits a working nurse is the campus requirement, and Huntsville states it precisely instead of promising flexibility: coursework is distance-accessible, and you come to campus for one intensive conference every other year. Full-time and part-time are both open. Its doctoral output puts it in the upper third of accredited institutions nationally, so the cohort is real without being large.
Arizona publishes a credit total and a clinical total for every specialty, and the ratio between them is the interesting part. The pediatric nurse practitioner route is 64 credit hours with 720 clinical hours. Executive health systems leadership is 50 credits with 630 practicum hours, so the leadership route trades away classroom time while giving up very little time in practice, which is not what most people assume about a track that is not primarily clinical. From a master’s, the post-master’s DNP is 35 credit hours. Setting that against the 64 the pediatric route takes from a bachelor’s is the clearest way to see what the master’s you already hold is worth in time rather than in money.
4 DNP tracks at this
institution, Clinical Nurse Specialist, Family nurse practitioner, Nursing administration, Nursing practice (general). Ranked once, on the largest.
Oklahoma publishes the conversion most schools leave implicit: one credit hour of practice inquiry equals 64 clinical hours. That single line lets you work out what a given semester actually costs you in time rather than in credits. The degree spans 35 to 51 credit hours and 1,000 to 1,280 clinical hours depending on route, split into 31 didactic credits and 20 clinical. For nurse anesthesia from a BSN the college describes its strongest applicants rather than just its minimum: a grade point average above 3.5, at least two years of critical care, and demonstrated unit leadership through charge roles, preceptorships or governance. The interview runs two to three hours.
Quinnipiac runs a fully online post-master’s doctorate with a floor of 36 credits, and floor is the operative word: additional courses get added depending on what your master’s covered and how the project progresses. The published number is a starting point rather than a total. The project courses carry 260 hours, and there are separate practicum sequences for leadership and for population health, so the practical work is split across two different kinds of setting rather than concentrated in one. Applications are rolling, with final deadlines roughly two weeks before classes start, which is unusually late and genuinely useful if you are deciding on a compressed timeline. You need an unencumbered registered nurse or advanced practice license to apply.
St Scholastica quantifies the campus commitment down to days: one to three each semester for lab and simulation, with everything else online or hybrid. That is a number you can hold against a roster, which minimal on-campus requirements on its own is not. Bachelor’s entry runs three years full-time and takes people holding a bachelor of science, a bachelor of arts or a nursing bachelor’s, so a non-nursing degree is not automatically a barrier. Three concentrations run: adult-gerontology acute care, family practice, and psychiatric mental health. The last of those is offered only at the Duluth campus, so if psychiatric practice is your aim, the location decision is already made for you.
Michigan State restricts its post-master’s doctorate to advanced practice registered nurses who already hold current national certification in their specialty. A master’s on its own is not enough here and an uncertified nurse is not eligible, so settle that before anything else. What you actually take is decided by a transcript review measuring the gap between your prior education and the doctoral outcomes, which means two applicants can be handed different plans. Everyone completes a project, a practicum and whatever courses that review identifies. There is also an option to add a second advanced practice specialty on request, which turns the doctorate into a route to a new patient population rather than only a credential upgrade.
4 DNP tracks at this
institution, Critical care, Family nurse practitioner, Geriatric, Nursing practice (general). Ranked once, on the largest.
Maryville publishes the doctoral core as a fixed block and everything else as a variable on top of it, which makes the routes easy to compare. The DNP core and capstone are 11 courses and 33 credit hours whichever concentration you take. From a BSN the whole degree is 74 to 77 credit hours depending on that concentration. The psychiatric mental health option, for instance, adds 21 credits of assessment, diagnosis and management on its own. Courses run fully online with start dates in spring, summer and fall rather than one annual intake, and the college puts its accelerated BSN-to-DNP at as few as 40 months against the three to four years a full-time route usually takes.
Arlington states something almost no school puts in writing: you must carry medical insurance covering emergency department evaluation and follow-up treatment for needle-stick injuries and blood-borne disease exposure, and the university will not cover that treatment itself. The requirement comes from the UT System Board of Regents. It is not a large cost next to tuition, but it is a real one, and knowing which risks sit with you rather than with the school is worth more than most brochure copy. The college runs a wide graduate ladder beside the doctorate, including practitioner master’s routes in adult-gerontology acute and primary care, psychiatric mental health, and pediatric acute and primary care, plus registered-nurse bridges into most of them.
South Alabama runs its DNP online, and the routes differ in length as much as in price. Enter with a BSN and you take the full 64 credit hours, MSN core and specialty included. Already practicing in an advanced role? The MSN-to-DNP route is 39 credits, because you take only the DNP core, project development and residency. Adding a new specialty on top of an MSN puts you back at 64. You get seven years either way, and the college wants the master’s portion finished in the first five. There is no dissertation. You complete an evidence-based project instead, and the residency behind it can be done in your own region rather than in Mobile. Two states are closed: the college is not accepting applications from South Dakota or New York.
North Dakota publishes the numbers a nurse anesthesia applicant actually wants, and they are unusually specific. Its class of 2025 passed the national certification exam at 100 percent on the first attempt. Every graduate over the past five years was working as a nurse anesthetist within six months of finishing. And the 2025 cohort averaged 996 cases each. That last one is the figure worth weighing, because case volume is what separates two programs that both clear the accreditation minimum, and very few schools publish it at all. These are the university’s own reported outcomes rather than a federal series, so read them as its claim.
Jacksonville State audits your master’s hours before it admits you rather than after. If your MSN carries fewer than 500 clinical practicum hours you are admitted conditionally and referred to an advanced experiential clinical course, and the admissions committee runs a gap analysis to decide how many of those hours, between one and five, you need to reach 500 and move on to the residency courses. Both the family nurse practitioner and the adult-gerontology acute care tracks then carry 700 clinical hours of their own, split between simulation and direct patient care. Entry wants a 3.0 GPA, taken on either your whole baccalaureate nursing program or its last 60 hours, whichever is higher.
Washington State places you itself through a clinical placement coordinator, and then draws the map: direct-care placements happen only in Washington, north Idaho and northern Oregon, because that is where the university holds nursing board authorization. It also warns about a trap of its own making. WSU takes part in the Western Regional Graduate Program, which cuts tuition for students from participating states, but placement availability has nothing to do with that, so a reduced rate does not mean you can do your clinical hours at home. Three tracks run: family practice, psychiatric mental health, and a post-master’s general route. Coursework is primarily online with a limited number of in-person labs at the Spokane, Tri-Cities and Vancouver campuses.
Illinois Chicago admits once a year, in fall, and that single intake is the first thing to plan around. The degree runs anywhere from two to six years depending on focus area, entry route and whether you study full or part time. From a master’s it is usually two to four. From a BSN it is 77 credit hours. Delivery is hybrid in the real sense rather than the marketing one, with some courses online, some blended and some on campus. The clinical requirement is 1,000 practicum hours, and in the adult-gerontology acute care focus 675 of those sit inside the specialty itself. One structural point: the college charges the same per-credit rate to residents and non-residents, so an Illinois address does not change what you pay.
Northwestern State says it runs the only nurse anesthesia program in the University of Louisiana System, and that is the reason most applicants look here. The anesthesia concentration is full-time and built on simulation and clinical work aimed at surgical, trauma and pain management settings, so it is a route to CRNA rather than a general doctorate. The other two concentrations point elsewhere entirely. Executive leadership covers systems management, finance, policy and organizational leadership for nurses moving into administration. Educational leadership covers curriculum design, assessment and supervised teaching for nurses moving into faculty work. Those are three different jobs and the university keeps them apart rather than folding leadership coursework into a clinical track. School-wide average graduate tuition here, which excludes DNP add-on charges, sits in the cheapest tenth of the 306 accredited institutions that publish a rate, in the 2023-24 federal figures, and the out-of-state rate is about 3 times the in-state one, so residency matters a great deal.
Northern Kentucky puts a hard experience gate at the door rather than partway through: one year minimum of full-time critical care experience as a registered nurse, within the past two years, with employer verification on a form. Recency is the part that catches people out, because intensive care work from five years ago does not count however much of it there was. From a BSN the degree is 106 credit hours over nine semesters, three years exactly. The post-master’s nurse anesthesia route is 37 semester credits over six semesters instead. Between 106 credits and 37, the master’s you already hold is worth roughly two years here.
Louisville is exact about the critical care experience its nurse anesthesia route wants, and the detail matters more than the minimum does. One year of full-time critical care, recent, with employment verification, and preference goes to applicants whose work routinely involved hemodynamic monitoring, mechanical ventilation and vasoactive drug administration. A year on a general medical floor will not read the same way as a year in an intensive care unit, and the catalog says so in as many words. The wider doctorate can be entered from a bachelor’s or a master’s across several specialties, and admission is reviewed holistically rather than on grade point average alone, though 3.0 is the recommended floor.
Purdue Global publishes the number most schools keep to themselves: it expects 15 to 18 hours of course work a week. That is the figure to hold up against your roster, and it is more useful than any completion estimate, because an estimate assumes you can find those hours in the first place. The doctorate runs nine courses and averages about a year and a half, taught entirely online. Nine courses is a short structure, which is what a post-master’s route looks like once the clinical core is behind you. This is a public online university of about 45,000 students conferring roughly forty nursing doctorates a year, so the program is real but small against the institution, and your cohort is scattered across the country rather than gathered anywhere.
Hawaii coordinates clinical placements for its clinical tracks rather than leaving you to find them, and those placements include rural and neighbor island sites serving underserved communities, which is a genuinely different clinical experience from a single urban hospital rotation. The doctoral project is expected to address a real health challenge in Hawaii, so the work is tied to place rather than portable. The application window is unusually long: for a fall 2027 start, master’s and doctoral applications open on 1 September 2026 and close 1 May 2027. The school also runs a graduate entry program for people coming into nursing from another field, and it enrolled its first research doctorate cohort in fall 2026.
Kansas City has run this degree since 2008, when it graduated the region’s first doctoral class, and the track list reflects that head start: adult-gerontology, family, primary care pediatrics, women’s health, psychiatric mental health, and a nurse anesthesia route available only from a bachelor’s. Women’s health as a standalone practitioner track is rare. The post-master’s side has three doors rather than one, and the second is the useful one, because nurses holding a master’s in leadership, informatics or clinical research management can enter, with national certification preferred rather than required. If your master’s took you away from direct practice, that is a route back. Plans of study are individualized, and you supply course syllabi so prior work can be assessed for transfer.
Southern Mississippi files its doctorate as clinical nursing, and the label is accurate: this is a practice degree pointed at advanced clinical work rather than at administration. It confers a substantial number of nursing doctorates a year, placing it in the upper quarter of accredited institutions nationally for output, so the cohort is real rather than a handful. The doctorate carries no distance flag in its federal filing, so plan on Hattiesburg. School-wide average graduate tuition here, which excludes DNP add-on charges, sits in the lowest third of the 306 accredited institutions that publish a rate, in the 2023-24 federal figures, and the out-of-state rate is barely higher, which is unusual for a public university.
Oshkosh publishes seven named routes rather than two entries with concentrations bolted on afterwards, and the distinctions between them are real. From a bachelor’s you can go to family practice, nurse anesthesia or psychiatric mental health. From a master’s you can go to family practice, psychiatric mental health, or an executive emphasis aimed at leadership work. There is also a separate route for advanced practice registered nurses moving into psychiatric mental health, which is a different starting point from a general master’s and is treated as one. Naming the routes this precisely means you can tell before applying which sequence you would actually be in, rather than finding out at advising. Nurse anesthesia from a bachelor’s is the heaviest of the seven.
Ohio University teaches its graduate nursing programs online, the doctorate included, while keeping the associate and bachelor’s routes on campus in Athens. That split tells you who each part of the school is for: undergraduates in residence, and working nurses at a distance. Its doctoral output sits in the upper half of accredited institutions nationally, so the program is established rather than nominal, though it is modest against the size of the university. School-wide average graduate tuition here, which excludes DNP add-on charges, sits in the lowest third of the 306 accredited institutions that publish a rate, in the 2023-24 federal figures.
Milwaukee runs a clinical nurse specialist track in adult-gerontology and calls itself the state’s hub for that role, which matters because the clinical nurse specialist is the advanced practice route most schools have quietly dropped. If you want systems-level clinical work rather than a practitioner license, this is one of the few places still building for it. The college holds more than 160 clinical partnerships, and that number is what determines whether a placement exists near you. Skills are trained in a dedicated simulation center before students reach patients. The Commission on Collegiate Nursing Education accredits the bachelor’s, the master’s, the doctorate and the post-graduate advanced practice certificate.
UMass Chan runs a graduate entry pathway into the doctorate, which takes people from outside nursing entirely: a year of prerequisites first, then the doctoral program, and its first cohort entered in 2015. That is a genuine career change route rather than an advancement one, and the school’s own account of it follows someone who spent fifteen years in corporate marketing before switching. Specialty work is additive here, with a palliative care focus requiring a further 90 clinical hours on top of the program. This is a medical school campus of under 1,500 students, and against that size it produces nursing doctorates at the third highest rate in the country.
Missouri St. Louis does not run its doctorate alone. The program is delivered online cooperatively with the Kansas City and Columbia campuses, so the course pool is wider than one college could staff and its shape is set by all three communities. Coursework is distance learning with a three-day on-campus intensive. Two conditions decide eligibility before anything else. The university cannot admit online students from every state, so check yours against its authorization list first. And your grade point average is calculated on the last 60 hours of the bachelor’s, floor 3.0, which helps if you finished stronger than you started. The acute care pediatric tracks want a year of inpatient pediatric nursing behind you.
St. Augustine publishes the whole shape of its psychiatric mental health route: 77 credit hours plus 1,334 practicum contact hours across 12 trimesters, about four years from a bachelor’s. Coursework is online with one required clinical intensive held virtually, which is a genuinely different commitment from flying somewhere. Two details reward a close read. Practicum hours here run well above the thousand most programs settle at, and the university publishes a different credit total for students in Arkansas, so the state you live in can change the degree requirement. Against its size this is one of the larger producers of nursing doctorates in the country.
George Mason splits its delivery by what you are learning rather than applying one format to everything. Coursework runs on the Fairfax campus in a flexible hybrid or executive format, while clinical skill development happens the traditional way, in person and supervised. The clinical requirement is 1,000 precepted and mentored hours, and the doctoral work takes the shape of two practice inquiry project courses across two semesters rather than one long capstone. Tracks cover family primary care, psychiatric mental health and adult-gerontology, each built around a different patient population, and the coursework is named accordingly: clinical psychopharmacology and individual psychotherapy in the psychiatric track, pharmacotherapeutics and advanced pathophysiology in the gerontology one.
Marquette takes master’s holders from three different backgrounds rather than only clinical ones: an advanced practice role, nursing administration and leadership, or health care policy. A policy master’s named explicitly as an entry route is unusual, and worth knowing if your work has moved away from the bedside. The curriculum spans translational research, epidemiology, informatics, statistics, advanced clinical practice and health policy. The deadlines are firm and worth marking: 15 November for spring entry and 15 February for fall, with late fall applications considered on a space-available basis if complete by 1 June. There is no summer admission at all, so the calendar has two doors rather than three.
Old Dominion publishes two numbers about teaching that most schools keep quiet. Ninety-eight percent of didactic courses are taught by full-time faculty rather than adjuncts, and clinical practicum supervision runs at one faculty member to six or eight students. Those figures decide what your week actually feels like, and they are more useful than any completion statistic. The doctorate comes in two specializations, advanced practice and nurse executive, and a nurse holding a master’s can enter either. Both run online with immersion experiences built in. School-wide average graduate tuition here, which excludes DNP add-on charges, sits in the middle third of the 306 accredited institutions that publish a rate, in the 2023-24 federal figures, and the out-of-state rate is about 3 times the in-state one, so residency matters a great deal.
Missouri State runs two paths and delivers them differently. Bachelor’s entry is a hybrid of seated and online doctoral classes, so real campus time is built in. The post-master’s route leans further online and hybrid specifically to keep campus visits down. That difference is the thing to weigh here, because it decides how far from Springfield you can afford to live. Both end in the same degree. The school sorts applicants by where they are starting rather than by what they want to specialize in, which is a simpler entry point than most and makes the decision easy once you know which credential you already hold.
Grand Canyon runs two versions of the doctorate, and the difference between them is one course and one practicum. The base program is the comprehensive doctorate. The organizational leadership version adds a leadership course and a practicum aimed at systems strategy and organizational change, and it runs 33 credits online in eight-week blocks. Eight-week courses mean fewer subjects at once and each one finished faster, which suits a nurse who would rather sprint through one topic than juggle three. The university runs a transfer evaluation before you commit, so what your existing graduate credit is worth gets settled up front rather than after you enroll. This is a large online university, and the doctoral cohort is spread across the country.
Robert Morris runs two practitioner doctorates and publishes both as course sequences, which shows you what the training actually contains. The psychiatric mental health route is the more detailed of the two: separate practicums for diagnosis across the lifespan, for managing disorders in two stages, for psychotherapy with individuals and again with families, and one specifically on psychiatric care of older adults. Psychotherapy with families as its own supervised course is not standard, and it matters if you expect to work with them. The family practice route covers women’s health, adults in two stages, and children and adolescents, each with a practicum of its own. Both run on campus and by distance education, and both lead to specialty certification eligibility.
Texas publishes the hidden costs most programs leave you to discover. The post-MSN DNP is hybrid across five semesters, and the college states plainly that tuition covers neither textbooks nor the travel and accommodation of getting to Austin for the on-campus portion, and that you will be charged $15 a year for liability cover. The 1,000 clinical practice hours sit inside the clinical specialization courses, and up to 500 hours completed during an MSN can be counted toward them. School-wide average graduate tuition here, which excludes DNP add-on charges, sits in the middle third of the 306 accredited institutions that publish a rate, in the 2023-24 federal figures. The post-MSN degree is 45 credit hours across those five semesters, which works out at roughly nine credits a term.
San Diego runs an unusually wide set of bachelor’s-entry tracks, two of them dual routes that qualify you in a second population: pediatric with family, and adult-gerontology with family. Earning two certifications inside one sequence is rare, and worth weighing against the extra time it takes. One condition settles it for anyone outside California: your California license endorsement has to be in progress at the point of admission, so the licensing question cannot wait until after you arrive. The grade point average floor is 3.0, calculated on your most recent bachelor’s or graduate coursework rather than on everything you have ever taken, and a year of clinical experience is preferred rather than required.
DePaul teaches the whole doctorate online and asynchronously, so there is no scheduled class time to work a roster around, and it reviews applications on a rolling basis rather than holding everything to a single date. Admission conditions change by track, which makes the concentration page the one to read rather than the program page. The nurse practitioner track takes both BSN- and MSN-prepared applicants, and whichever you hold has to come from a program accredited by CCNE, ACEN or CNEA. The university says it recently put more than forty million dollars into College of Science and Health facilities, including a rebuilt nursing simulation lab. Its doctoral output sits in the upper third of accredited institutions nationally, so the online cohort is a real one rather than a side offering.
Gannon runs its DNP as a bridge from an MSN rather than as a standalone doctorate, and it sizes that bridge to what you already did: 26 to 32 credits, with where you land inside that range decided by how many clinical hours your master’s brought with it. Six credits is a semester’s difference, so it is worth establishing early rather than after you enroll. It charges one published rate whichever state you live in, so residency does not move the price here the way it does at a public university. And it confers a substantial number of doctorates a year for a private institution of about 4,200 students, which points to an established program rather than a new one.
Chatham runs a 27-credit low-residency post-master’s doctorate that can be finished in four terms, one of the shorter honest routes on this site. The 500-hour rule is the one to read carefully: if you have not completed 500 clinical hours before you enroll, the shortfall has to be made up during the program, and it is required for the degree to be conferred. A lighter master’s practicum turns into extra work here rather than a waiver. The admission essay asks you to describe a clinical problem in your own practice setting and explain how you would spend those 500 hours changing it, so the application is effectively a project proposal. There is no prerequisite course list, but faculty expect research methods and statistics behind you.
Western Carolina builds its DNP on a master’s you already hold, and that makes the arithmetic unusually clean: 34 credit hours, and 1,000 clinical practice hours of which 500 transfer straight across from your MSN. The half you still owe is the half the program actually teaches. It runs fully online. School-wide average graduate tuition here, which excludes DNP add-on charges, sits in the cheapest tenth of the 306 accredited institutions that publish a rate, in the 2023-24 federal figures, and the out-of-state rate is about 3.5 times the in-state one, so residency matters a great deal. A rate that far below everyone else is worth confirming with the bursar before you build a budget on it.
Jefferson’s nurse anesthesia doctorate publishes the number that matters most in that field: more than 650 anesthetics administered across over 2,000 clinical hours, inside an integrated 36-month, nine-semester program of 85 credits, accredited through 2029. Case volume is what separates anesthesia programs from each other, and most of them do not state it. The condition attached is unusual and expensive to miss. Every student must hold active Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Delaware nursing licenses before clinical work starts, and keep all three current for the whole program, because the rotations cross state lines. Three licenses, three renewal cycles, three sets of fees. From fall 2026 the college is adding program options in Center Valley through a partnership with a 33-hospital health network.
New Mexico State runs three very different doctorates under one roof, and the credit totals show how different: population health leadership from a master’s is 36 to 42 credits, family practice from a bachelor’s is 77 across three years full-time, and nurse anesthesiology is 102. The anesthesiology route also carries a minimum of 2,400 supervised clinical contact hours against the 1,000 the other concentrations require, which is the honest price of that credential. Coursework runs online with an on-campus orientation, and the clinical practicum happens in your own hometown rather than at a site the university assigns. Admission is in the fall, and the anesthesiology concentration carries its own accreditation from the Council on Accreditation.
Eau Claire requires a Wisconsin registered nurse license, and it puts a date on it. Post-master’s students need it at least two weeks before the program starts. Bachelor’s-entry students need it by 1 July immediately following admission. Licensure by endorsement takes time, so if you are out of state, start that process when you apply rather than when you are accepted. Both routes want a 3.00 grade point average and degrees from programs accredited by the Commission on Collegiate Nursing Education, the National League for Nursing or the Accreditation Commission for Education in Nursing, plus a statistics course passed at C or better. After admission come health records, a criminal background check and current CPR certification.
5 DNP tracks at this
institution, Adult health, Critical care, Family nurse practitioner, Nursing administration, Psychiatric-mental health NP. Ranked once, on the largest.
Winona State scopes its post-master’s doctorate narrowly: your master’s has to be in nursing with a focus in administration or leadership. A clinical practitioner master’s is not the intended input here, which makes this a leadership doctorate in substance as well as in name. A year of clinical nursing experience in a master’s-level role is recommended on top of that. The provision worth knowing before you commit is that you can take up to 12 credits as a non-degree student and transfer them in once you are accepted. That lets you test the program and the workload against your life before carrying a full application, which very few schools allow.
Chamberlain runs its DNP fully online and puts the shortest route at two years. It describes itself as the largest DNP program in the country by total graduates, which is its own claim rather than a federal one. The rule to check before you apply concerns the master’s you already hold. If you have a BSN plus a graduate degree in a field other than nursing, you must transfer in or complete at least six designated Chamberlain courses, 18 credit hours in all, before you can be admitted to the doctorate at all. That is a semester of work most applicants do not budget for. Focus areas then sit on top of the core as two elective leadership courses each.
Oakland runs a fully online post-master’s doctorate on a two or three year plan of study, and it is precise about what your past counts for. Up to 640 practicum hours from your master’s can transfer, and unsupervised post-graduate clinical practice does not count at all. That second half is the part people get wrong, because years of independent practice feel like they ought to count and here they do not. If you hold one of the four advanced practice specialties, nurse practitioner, nurse anesthetist, nurse midwife or clinical nurse specialist, you document those hours through a supplemental application rather than a transcript. School-wide average graduate tuition here, which excludes DNP add-on charges, sits in the highest third of the 306 accredited institutions that publish a rate, in the 2023-24 federal figures, and the out-of-state rate is barely higher, which is unusual for a public university.
Boston College runs three ways in, and one of them is unusual: registered nurses without a bachelor’s degree can enter directly if they have completed roughly 112 college credits, earning the master’s for practitioner preparation and continuing straight into the doctorate. The other two routes start from a bachelor’s or a master’s in nursing. All three want an undergraduate average of B or better and a completed statistics course, and the school states plainly that AP credit will not cover the statistics. Clinical work rotates across three to six sites rather than parking you at one, and those include Boston Health Care for the Homeless Program, so the settings differ from each other in ways that show up in what you see. 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.
Colorado Christian is explicit that it is a Christian university and that the doctorate is built that way. The curriculum is framed around biblical truth alongside the national nursing competencies, and admission asks for a stated desire to do doctoral work in a Christ-centered community. Read that as information rather than marketing, because it shapes who is in the cohort. The leadership track for master’s holders runs 520 clinical hours and you complete them where you already live, rather than traveling to a placement the school picks. Courses come in 5, 10 and 15 week blocks with a one-day online orientation. One caveat comes before all of it: the program is online but open only to students in certain states, so check whether yours is one.
Michigan Flint publishes the master’s and the doctoral portions separately, which makes the real cost of the doctorate in credits visible in a way most schools avoid. For the family nurse practitioner concentration the master’s core is 52 credits and the combined MSN and DNP is 70, so the doctoral layer is 18 credits on top. Adult-gerontology primary care runs 55 and 73, the same 18-credit difference. If you already hold a master’s, the MSN-to-DNP route is 30 to 34 credit hours, nearly twice that 18, and the gap is the price of the college bridging whatever your master’s did not cover. Admission carries a small non-refundable deposit to hold your seat.
VCU is a large public research university in Richmond whose DNP is flagged for distance education in the federal record, so the online description holds up rather than being partial. It funds some doctoral students through graduate teaching assistantships, and the terms are published rather than vague: at least nine credit hours of registration, good academic standing, and 20 hours of work a week. That is close to a half-time job, so an assistantship here is a real commitment rather than a stipend. School-wide average graduate tuition here, which excludes DNP add-on charges, sits in the middle third of the 306 accredited institutions that publish a rate, in the 2023-24 federal figures.
2 DNP tracks at this
institution, Family nurse practitioner, Nursing practice (general). Ranked once, on the largest.
Jacksonville draws a sharp line between its two routes. Bachelor’s entry to family practice wants a 3.3 undergraduate nursing grade point average, which sits above the usual 3.0 floor, plus a year of professional nursing experience before clinical work begins. The post-master’s doctorate is the flexible one: fully online, with fall and spring starts, and the school states plainly that no campus visits are required. That last point is worth more than it sounds, because plenty of programs call themselves online and then schedule intensives you have to fly to. Your background check may be released to clinical agencies so they can approve your placement, which is routine but worth knowing before you consent to it.
Clemson delivers all of its DNP coursework online and sets a floor rather than a target on length: a minimum of six semesters, which is two years if you run straight through. A minimum is a useful thing to be told, because it is the number a school cannot talk you below, whereas an advertised completion time usually assumes everything goes right. Its federal filing does carry a distance-education flag, so the online description holds up rather than being a partial one. School-wide average graduate tuition here, which excludes DNP add-on charges, sits in the middle third of the 306 accredited institutions that publish a rate, in the 2023-24 federal figures.
Wyoming runs a distance-accessible full-time doctorate in two clinical tracks, family and psychiatric mental health, with 960 hours of on-site clinical experience concentrated in the last three semesters rather than spread thin across the program. The post-master’s entry has a currency rule worth reading before you apply: you need 3 credit hours each in advanced pharmacology, pathophysiology and health assessment, plus either 600 practice hours in your specialty over the past two years or 1,500 over the past five, unless you graduated from a specialty program within the last two. The university also publishes a state-by-state determination of whether its program meets licensure requirements where you live, and it names the states where it does not. School-wide average graduate tuition here, which excludes DNP add-on charges, sits in the cheapest tenth of the 306 accredited institutions that publish a rate, in the 2023-24 federal figures, and the out-of-state rate is about 3 times the in-state one, so residency matters a great deal.
Bradley publishes credits, years, semesters and clinical hours together for each route, which makes the trade explicit in a way most schools avoid. From a BSN, the adult-gerontology acute care doctorate is 68 credit hours over 10 semesters, about three years and four months, carrying the full 1,000 clinical hours. If you already hold a master’s and want the post-master’s certificate in the same specialty instead, that is 32 credits over five semesters, roughly a year and eight months, with 600 clinical hours. Half the time and under half the credits, for a certificate rather than a doctorate. The programs run online, and there is a separate RN-to-MSN entry for nurses holding an associate degree, a diploma or a bachelor’s in another field.
Elms publishes its two nurse practitioner timelines plainly: about three years full time if you enter with a bachelor’s, and about two and a half if you already hold a master’s. That six-month gap is smaller than at most schools, where a master’s typically saves a year or more, so if you are MSN-prepared and comparing programs on time saved, this is one where the advantage is thinner than usual. It is a small private college in Chicopee of roughly 1,270 students, and it confers around nineteen doctorates a year, which is a high output for its size and suggests the nursing doctorate is a substantial part of what the college does.
Nebraska Methodist splits its BSN-to-DNP into two numbers you can actually plan around. The degree is 75 credit hours. Fifty-seven of those you can complete online, in a mix of synchronous and asynchronous courses, and the remaining 18 are clinical practice carrying 1,080 contact hours. So roughly three quarters of the coursework is remote and the clinical quarter is not, which is a far clearer division than most schools calling themselves online will give you. Those 1,080 contact hours also sit above the 1,000 post-baccalaureate hours the degree standard calls for. The same split holds across the tracks, including family nurse practitioner and the adult-gerontology clinical nurse specialist route.
Abilene Christian teaches its online programs in seven-week terms rather than semesters, so you carry fewer courses at once and finish each of them faster. Its scholarship terms are written around continuous enrollment across consecutive parts of term, which rewards momentum and penalizes pauses, so the structure suits someone who can commit to a steady run rather than stopping and starting. Against its size, ACU confers nursing doctorates at a rate in the top eighth of accredited institutions nationally, so the doctoral program is substantial even though the university is better known for other things. The master’s beneath it runs 36 credit hours with concentrations in nurse education and nursing administration.
Rutgers Camden puts a hard experience gate partway through rather than at the door: you need at least two years of registered nurse experience before you can progress into Primary Care Clinical I. So the clock on eligibility keeps running after you enroll, which is unusual and worth mapping against your own service. The clinical volume is unusual too. Students complete roughly 1,400 to 1,600 supervised clinical hours, well above the 1,000 the degree standard sets. Clinical theory courses are taught in person on campus, with some of the scholarly and didactic coursework offered hybrid, and the school describes the program as rigorous and full-time rather than something to fit around a roster.
Wilkes runs its post-master’s doctorate online and mostly asynchronously, and it counts indirect clinical hours toward the total, which matters if your work is systems and leadership rather than direct patient care. How many hours you owe depends on what your master’s already covered, so the number gets settled against your transcript instead of being published as one figure. The catalog also carries a course whose stated purpose is giving students more time to finish the required 1,000 hours. That is a quiet admission that the hours are where people run long, and it is more useful than a completion estimate. If you are here to move into a leadership role rather than a new clinical population, the shape fits that.
East Tennessee State publishes a semester count for every combination, which is rarer than it should be. Bachelor’s entry runs nine semesters full-time or fifteen part-time. Master’s entry runs four semesters full-time or seven part-time, but only while your doctorate stays in the same concentration as your master’s. Switch concentrations and you get an individualized plan of study instead of a published timeline, which is the school telling you the number will be larger. Coursework is delivered online and asynchronously. The college also guarantees admission to up to ten qualified ROTC students per cohort, which is a real advantage if you are one of them. School-wide average graduate tuition here, which excludes DNP add-on charges, sits in the lowest third of the 306 accredited institutions that publish a rate, in the 2023-24 federal figures, and the out-of-state rate is about 2.5 times the in-state one, so residency matters a great deal.
South Dakota State points its doctorate at rural and underserved practice, which is an orientation rather than a slogan in a state with that geography. Bachelor’s entry to the family practitioner route is 78 credits and 1,020 clinical hours, taught online with a field-based practicum and a few classes that may need a campus visit. The provision to check first is the three P’s. If you have already completed advanced pathophysiology, advanced pharmacology and advanced assessment to the standard the school wants, 12 credits come off your plan, and the school says that can turn a four-year program into a three-year one. A whole year turning on three courses is worth an email before you apply. A psychiatric mental health specialization runs alongside.
Idaho State calculates your grade point average on the last 60 credits of your bachelor’s rather than the whole degree, with a floor of 3.0, which helps if you started slowly and finished well. Post-master’s applicants have a paperwork job most schools do not ask for: an official letter carrying the university seal, documenting exactly how many clinical hours your master’s program included. You then sign a contract with the school committing to whatever additional hours are needed to meet the national requirement, so any shortfall is settled in writing at admission rather than discovered later. The school of nursing awards more than $100,000 in scholarships a year and opens applications in April. School-wide average graduate tuition here, which excludes DNP add-on charges, sits in the lowest third of the 306 accredited institutions that publish a rate, in the 2023-24 federal figures, and the out-of-state rate is about 3 times the in-state one, so residency matters a great deal.
Wilmington runs three cohorts a year, starting in spring, summer and fall, which is more entry points than almost any program on this site and means you rarely wait long to begin. The deadlines are 1 October, 1 March and 15 June respectively, but the wording that follows them is the part that matters: applications close on those dates or as soon as the cohort fills. So the deadline is a ceiling rather than a target, and applying early is the difference between a place and a wait. Three intakes also means that if life interrupts, the gap before you can rejoin is months rather than a year.
Barry gates its post-master’s doctorate on certification rather than a transcript audit. You need a valid, current national certification in an advanced nursing practice specialty, and the school treats that certification as the evidence you have already met the minimum clinical hours for your specialty. That is a cleaner test than counting hours one by one, and it means an uncertified master’s holder is not eligible here however many hours they logged. Barry confers one of the larger numbers of nursing doctorates in the country, both outright and against its size, sitting in the top tenth on each. The program carries no distance flag federally, so plan on Miami.
UCLA attaches a freshness rule to one prerequisite that quietly rules people out: the statistics course has to have been taken within five years of when you matriculate. A course from your bachelor’s a decade ago will not carry, so budget for retaking it. The pediatric practitioner focus is scoped precisely, newborns through young adults up to age 21, which tells you the patient population instead of leaving pediatric to mean whatever you assume. The doctorate carries no distance flag in the federal filing, so this is a Los Angeles program rather than a remote one. School-wide average graduate tuition here, which excludes DNP add-on charges, sits in the middle third of the 306 accredited institutions that publish a rate, in the 2023-24 federal figures.
Washburn sets the doctorate against what you already hold rather than running one sequence for everyone. The school describes the program as advanced practice education matched to your entry education level, your certification and the practice you intend, so a bachelor’s-prepared registered nurse and a certified practitioner are not doing the same plan of study. The bachelor’s route is written for nurses who keep working through it. Delivery is distance accessible, which is the school’s own phrase and a more careful one than fully online. School-wide average graduate tuition here, which excludes DNP add-on charges, sits in the lowest third of the 306 accredited institutions that publish a rate, in the 2023-24 federal figures.
2 DNP tracks at this
institution, Family nurse practitioner, Nursing practice (general). Ranked once, on the largest.
Viterbo is specific about who may write your references, and it rules out the easy option. One has to come from your current clinical supervisor, and that person must either practice in the role you are seeking or work alongside people who do. The second must come from a physician, physician assistant or advanced practice nurse. A reference from a manager who has never done the job will not satisfy it. Everyone who clears that stage gets a personal interview. Bachelor’s entry is a year-round curriculum of three to three and a half years including summers, mostly online with roughly one day a week on campus, and practicums can usually be done where you already live. Full-time places are limited and part-time admission depends on space.
UT Tyler runs its main doctorate part-time and primarily online at an average of two courses a semester, finishing in three years, a pace built around people who are not stepping back from work. The application asks for a three to five page paper naming your area of interest and saying why this program in particular, so the essay does real filtering rather than serving as a formality. Priority applications close 1 April for a fall start, with a final deadline of 15 June. Alongside it runs a very different thing: a 36-month nurse anesthesia doctorate that also prepares you as an adult-gerontology acute care practitioner, aimed at critical care nurses. Two credentials out of one intense sequence.
Sacred Heart builds the family nurse practitioner clinical work around you rather than handing you a rotation. Its two clinical immersion courses are designed individually against the student’s own clinical interests, which is a different arrangement from being placed wherever a slot happens to be open. The college also runs role immersion sequences for the clinical nurse leader and the nurse educator paths, each ending in a capstone rather than an exam. One course in the catalog tells you something no brochure will: there is a continuous enrollment option for students who need more time to finish required clinical hours. Hours run over more often than schools say out loud, and Sacred Heart has built a way to stay enrolled while you finish them.
Waynesburg asks for a portfolio, capped at 25 pages, evidencing your professional career. Almost no nursing doctorate requires one, and it takes real time to assemble. It also wants a written letter of support from your clinical practice setting, so your employer has to know you are applying. Advanced practice nurses show either national certification or 500 documented hours of clinical practice from their master’s. A graduate degree in another discipline is accepted alongside a nursing bachelor’s, but it gets evaluated individually and additional master’s-level courses are added. One deadline is easy to miss: you must start within a year of being admitted, and applications go inactive and are destroyed after a year. The degree is 36 credits over three or four years.
Indiana Wesleyan teaches its doctorate online through the division of nursing inside a school of integrated health, and it is explicit that the environment is Christ-centered, which is information about the cohort rather than a marketing line. The Commission on Collegiate Nursing Education accredits the bachelor’s, the master’s, the doctorate and the post-graduate advanced practice certificate, so the whole ladder is covered. School-wide average graduate tuition here, which excludes DNP add-on charges, sits in the lowest third 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.
Central Arkansas sets its DNP at 33 to 36 credit hours and requires documented evidence of 1,000 post-baccalaureate clinical practice hours, which is a different requirement from completing them here. If your record falls short of the thousand, the college has a named course for exactly that, a DNP clinical internship you enroll in to make up the difference. So the shortfall has a fixed remedy rather than turning into a negotiation with an advisor. That matters more than it sounds, because the hours you banked during a master’s are the variable that decides how long a post-master’s doctorate really takes, and very few schools publish the mechanism for topping them up.
Spring Arbor built its online DNP around a calendar rather than a semester. Courses run seven weeks with a one-week break between them, and the degree is designed to finish in 20 months, which is short enough to change the arithmetic if you are weighing a doctorate against staying where you are. Alongside the degree it runs three online post-master’s certificates, and they are scoped to who you already are: family nurse practitioner in two versions, one for nurse practitioners converting and one for nurses who are not yet NPs, an adult-gerontology primary care route for non-NPs, and a nurse educator certificate.
Connecticut calls its doctorate online and then names the two dates you cannot miss: intensive sessions on the Storrs campus in August and in January. Budget for those trips before anything else. Two entry points run, one from a bachelor’s and one from a master’s for nurses already licensed and certified in an advanced practice role. The post-master’s route carries a requirement the other does not: verification of 2,080 direct patient care hours as a registered nurse, on a form, completed before you apply. That is a full year of full-time practice, evidenced rather than asserted. Admission wants a nursing bachelor’s from a regionally accredited institution, a 3.0 undergraduate average and three references.
Rush prices its DNP in time rather than in one number, and the three entry points are genuinely different lengths. From a BSN it runs about three and two-thirds years. From a master’s in a non-APRN role it is three years, and from a master’s as a practicing APRN it is two. The clinical practicum follows the same logic: 756 hours from a BSN or a non-APRN master’s, and between 500 and 756 for an APRN, settled by a gap analysis of what you already hold. Nurse anesthesia ignores all of that at 36 months for everyone whatever they enter with, and it is accredited by the COA rather than CCNE, re-accredited in 2025 and running to 2035.
2 DNP tracks at this
institution, Nursing administration, Nursing practice (general). Ranked once, on the largest.
Baylor confers 196 doctorates in nursing practice a year, which is among the largest outputs in the country and is explained by an online school running several tracks at once. The pediatric route splits in two and the college is explicit about the difference: a primary care track working with children and families, and an acute care track for pediatric patients with complex, critical or chronic illness in hospitals, intensive care units and emergency departments. The family route is post-master’+A+’s only, gated on an MSN in family practice, a 3.0 cumulative GPA and existing board certification. Note that the pediatric track is not currently offered at post-master’+A+’s level, so the two population focuses admit from different places.
Delta State takes applications year round rather than against one annual deadline, which removes the wait that stops people applying when they are actually ready. The doctorate is online with campus visits each semester, taken full-time or part-time. School-wide average graduate tuition here, which excludes DNP add-on charges, sits in the lowest fifth of the 306 accredited institutions that publish a rate, in the 2023-24 federal figures, and the out-of-state rate is barely higher, which is unusual for a public university. Against its size the school confers nursing doctorates at a rate in the top quarter of accredited institutions, so a small campus is running a real doctoral program rather than a token one.
Capella runs its DNP in two different measurement systems, and which one you are in changes how you plan. The standard route counts quarter credits, at least 52 of them, across 11 quarters, which the university puts at two years and nine months. The self-paced route counts program points instead, at least 26, and how fast you finish depends on how fast you complete rather than on a semester calendar. Both carry the same minimum of 1,000 practicum hours, so the flexibility is in the coursework rather than in the clinical requirement. You need an unrestricted RN license, or to be within six months of holding one, before you start.
James Madison publishes three credit totals and one hour total. The post-master’s route is 40 to 46 credits, bachelor’s entry is 77, and healthcare systems leadership is 69, and every one of them carries the same 1,000 course-related practice hours. The hours do not move with your prior degree here, only the coursework does. The funding is the part worth chasing: a graduate assistantship covers full tuition and fees and pays a stipend, in exchange for 18 hours a week working with faculty. Eighteen hours is close to a half-time job, so it suits someone stepping back from clinical work rather than fitting a doctorate around full shifts. School-wide average graduate tuition here, which excludes DNP add-on charges, sits in the middle third of the 306 accredited institutions that publish a rate, in the 2023-24 federal figures.
Miami runs its family practitioner route so it can end in either a master’s or the doctorate, with eligibility for family practitioner certification either way, so how far you go is not locked in at admission. Beside the doctorate sit post-master’s certificates in adult-gerontology acute care, adult-gerontology primary care, family practice and oncology. The oncology certificate is the unusual one, because very few schools train advanced practice nurses specifically for cancer care, and it leads to a different job rather than a variation on the same one. The doctorate carries no distance flag in its federal filing, so plan on Coral Gables. 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.
Phoenix attaches a recency condition that most schools leave out. You need a master’s in nursing, an unencumbered RN license, a cumulative grade point average of 3.0, and the equivalent of three years of full-time nursing work within the past ten years. That last clause is the one to read twice. Experience that has aged past a decade does not count, so a nurse coming back after a long stretch away from practice has a problem here that another school would not create. This is a for-profit university and the largest institution on this site by enrollment, though the nursing doctorate is a small part of it. Phoenix confers about thirty a year, which against an enrollment above a hundred thousand is among the lowest doctoral outputs for size in the country.
Thomas Edison built its whole institution around working adults, and the doctorate shows it: 36 credits, finishing in 12 to 24 months, with a scholarly immersion project you can run inside your current job rather than somewhere else. Twelve months is fast for a doctorate, and it is only plausible because the project is meant to sit on top of work you are already doing. If your employer has a problem worth fixing and will let you fix it, that is the shape this program assumes. Everything runs online. School-wide average graduate tuition here, which excludes DNP add-on charges, sits in the middle third of the 306 accredited institutions that publish a rate, in the 2023-24 federal figures, and the out-of-state rate is barely higher, which is unusual for a public university.
El Paso runs its doctorate as a post-master’s degree and pairs it with two post-graduate certificate routes, split by whether you already hold advanced practice registered nurse recognition. That split is the useful part: a nurse who is already an APRN and one who holds a master’s without that recognition are sent down different paths rather than into one queue. The college states plainly that it prepares graduates for practice across Texas and nationally, and the doctorate carries no distance flag in its federal filing, so plan on being in El Paso. School-wide average graduate tuition here, which excludes DNP add-on charges, sits in the cheapest tenth of the 306 accredited institutions that publish a rate, in the 2023-24 federal figures, and the out-of-state rate is about 2.5 times the in-state one, so residency matters a great deal.
Shepherd’s doctorate was the university’s first doctoral degree of any kind, launched in 2015 with a cohort of fifteen, and it is taught at the Martinsburg Center rather than the main campus. Instruction mixes face-to-face, hybrid and online formats instead of committing to one. Three entries run: from a bachelor’s, and from a master’s into either family or psychiatric mental health practice. If you hold a master’s in nursing but are not certified as a practitioner, the school runs an individual transcript evaluation to work out what transfers, so what you owe is settled against your record rather than a published figure. The stated focus is care for vulnerable populations, which in West Virginia means something concrete about where graduates end up working.
Corpus Christi’s doctorate is young. The practitioner track admitted its first class in fall 2016, seven students graduated in 2018, and an executive leadership track followed in fall 2019. Two routes run now, one clinical and one for leadership, so the program has had time to settle without being long established. Online students defend their doctoral projects to the university community rather than to a closed committee, which changes how the work ends and what it has to withstand. Graduates are pointed at South Texas health care and the projects reflect that, taking on problems in the communities the program serves. It is accredited by the Commission on Collegiate Nursing Education.
Northwestern Oklahoma State built its doctorate around rural practice, and it is the first BSN-to-DNP at a public Oklahoma university to prepare family nurse practitioners. The program carries the name of the Wisdom Family Foundation, and the rural focus is the substance rather than a marketing line, because rural placement is where preceptor availability actually bites. From a BSN the degree is 73 credit hours. If you already hold a master’s in nursing, the post-master’s option is 37 to 39. Cohorts start on a fixed cycle with a 1 March application deadline, so this is not a program you drift into at some convenient point in the year.
South University sets a deadline that catches people out: official documentation of the clinical hours you completed after your bachelor’s has to be submitted within five weeks of your start date. Five weeks is not long to get a former program to certify a transcript detail, so start that request before you enroll rather than after. The doctorate runs online, and by output it is one of the larger nursing doctorates in the country, so the program itself is well established. The federal file also records a 7 percent graduation rate for the institution as a whole. That figure is undergraduate-weighted rather than a measure of this doctorate, and it is the sort of number to ask about directly before committing.
3 DNP tracks at this
institution, Critical care, Emergency and trauma, Nursing practice (general). Ranked once, on the largest.
Vanderbilt attaches a recency window to its experience requirement, and that is the detail to check before anything else: at least one year of full-time work, or the part-time equivalent, as a registered nurse in a critical care setting, and it has to fall within the past five years. Critical care from six years ago does not count however much of it you did. It accepts an unencumbered license as either a registered nurse or an APRN, and explicitly extends that to United States territories and protectorates rather than the fifty states alone, which matters if you trained or practice in Puerto Rico or Guam.
Chattanooga caps what your past counts for, and says so plainly. The doctorate requires 1,000 clinical hours, and a post-master’s student may apply at most 500 hours earned after the bachelor’s toward that total. So a nurse arriving with a full master’s practicum behind them is still doing 500 more hours here. The post-master’s curriculum runs a minimum of 36 semester credits. Those hours finish in a clinical residency where you complete a translational project supervised by a chair and a committee, which is closer to a thesis structure than to a capstone. School-wide average graduate tuition here, which excludes DNP add-on charges, sits in the lowest third of the 306 accredited institutions that publish a rate, in the 2023-24 federal figures.
Case Western teaches in an intensive format that changes what part-time means: a three-credit course meets for five or six days rather than weekly across a semester. If you can free up a week, you can take a course. If your roster gives you scattered evenings instead, this is a poor fit. Which sequence you choose also decides where you have to be. The education and executive leadership sequences run remote and synchronous in a cohort, while the practice leadership sequence is primarily in person, so picking a sequence for its content means picking a travel commitment with it. Read those two things together. The post-master’s curriculum assumes you already practice as an advanced practice nurse, an administrator or an educator.
Grand Valley runs a hybrid doctorate with online coursework and specialty practicums, and it quantifies the campus commitment: one or two on-campus sessions a semester in its interprofessional simulation space. It also employs a full-time placement coordinator whose job is finding your clinical sites, and that is the difference between a program that runs to schedule and one that stalls. Graduate assistantships are available, so ask about them early rather than after you have committed to paying. The fall cohort has a preferred deadline of 1 May and a final deadline of 15 July, and applying by the earlier one is the safer plan when places are cohort-limited.
5 DNP tracks at this
institution, Family nurse practitioner, Maternal/Child Health and Neonatal Nurse/Nursing, Nursing practice (general), Pediatric, Psychiatric-mental health NP. Ranked once, on the largest.
Wayne State runs seven clinical specialties inside its doctorate, more than most schools staff, and it builds a plan of study around your circumstances rather than running one fixed sequence for everyone. The funding detail is worth chasing if psychiatric mental health is your direction. The college reports that state IMPACT grant money awarded to Wayne State for psychiatric-mental health nurse practitioners covered one doctoral student’s tuition in full. Grant money tied to a shortage specialty is the kind of thing that changes what a degree costs, and it is worth raising with admissions directly. The college also runs a research doctorate and graduate certificates alongside, so you can move between practice and research routes in one place.
Temple houses its nursing doctorate inside a college of public health rather than a standalone school of nursing, so the people around you are epidemiologists, biostatisticians and physical therapists as well as nurses. That shapes the degree toward population-level work. Classes meet one day a week at the Health Sciences Center, which is the most useful scheduling fact on this card, because it lets you plan a year of shifts around one fixed day. Many courses mix online and in-person delivery. Both entries, from a bachelor’s and from a master’s, run full-time or part-time, and you can take the degree with or without a concentration. The scholarly project starts in your first year rather than waiting until the end.
West Chester runs a cohort model over six semesters, and the detail that shapes your calendar is that those semesters are fall and spring only. No summer terms means the sequence is fixed at three academic years, with no way to accelerate through a break. The curriculum splits into three named blocks, 10 credits of nursing science, 9 of leadership and 16 of practice, so 35 credits with practice carrying the largest share. It builds on a master’s rather than starting from a bachelor’s. School-wide average graduate tuition here, which excludes DNP add-on charges, sits in the lowest third of the 306 accredited institutions that publish a rate, in the 2023-24 federal figures.
New Mexico publishes a ceiling rather than a fixed number for its post-master’s DNP: 44 credits at most, with what you actually take decided by a gap analysis of the master’s you hold. A ceiling is more useful than an average, because it tells you the worst case you are signing up for rather than the typical one. The wider context is a large public university in Albuquerque where the resident rate is a fraction of the non-resident one, so New Mexico residency changes this decision more than the curriculum does. Its DNP output is modest against the size of the institution, so expect a small cohort inside a big university.
Wake Forest runs its doctorate through the School of Medicine rather than a school of nursing, and three of its 30 credits are taken in the university’s law school. Health law and policy electives inside a nursing doctorate is not a combination other programs offer, and it tells you what this degree is for: leadership and policy rather than clinical practice. The program is 24 months, part-time and online, with no clinical component at all beyond a leadership practicum in the final semester, which makes it one of the few nursing doctorates you can take without arranging a placement. A new cohort starts each August, and admission wants a 3.0 in a master’s in nursing plus two references.
5 DNP tracks at this
institution, Geriatric, Maternal/Child Health and Neonatal Nurse/Nursing, Pediatric, Public Health/Community Nurse/Nursing, Registered nursing (general). Ranked once, on the largest.
Michigan places you rather than leaving you to find a preceptor. Faculty match students to clinical sites from a curated network, which is the opposite of the arrangement that stalls people at other schools. Two routes run. Bachelor’s entry offers a three or four year plan, web-blended with required on-campus learning, and you may apply to only one specialty option, so choosing wrong costs you a cycle. The post-master’s route is a two-year plan. Your registered nurse license has to be active in the state where you will do the clinical work before your first term, not merely somewhere. No GRE is required for any graduate program here. Three references are asked for, and the school prefers they hold a master’s in nursing or higher.
Pacific Lutheran arranges every clinical placement through its own faculty, which is the thing that decides whether a doctorate finishes on time, and it keeps cohorts small on purpose. Three entries run: from a bachelor’s, from a master’s, and from a master’s held by a nurse already working in an advanced practice role, with concentrations in family practice and psychiatric mental health. The core is 42 semester hours, taken full-time or part-time. Two practical points. Admission is capped each year and competitive, and once accepted you have three weeks to confirm with a non-refundable $300 advance tuition payment. The grade point average floor is 3.0 across all college work rather than just the nursing degree, which is a stricter test than it first looks.
Clarke is a college of under a thousand students that turns out nursing doctorates at a rate in the top tenth of accredited institutions nationally, which tells you where its attention goes. Admission asks for no GRE and considers applicants individually, with preference for a cumulative and core grade point average of 3.0 or better across the bachelor’s and any master’s. The bridge route for master’s holders wants documentation of the clinical hours your master’s included, so dig that out before you apply. The Commission on Collegiate Nursing Education accredits the bachelor’s, the doctorate and the post-graduate advanced practice certificate here, so the whole ladder is covered rather than just the top of it.
Southern sets the steepest experience bar on this site: three years of full-time advanced practice as a certified nurse practitioner or nurse midwife, and it has to fall within the past five years. Most schools ask for one year, or none at all. You also need a current unencumbered Louisiana advanced practice license with no restrictions, plus national certification, so this is a doctorate for people already established in practice in that state rather than a route into it. The grade point average floor is 3.2 across the courses counted toward your master’s, above the usual 3.0. Applications close 15 April for fall and 1 November for spring, and the statement of interest runs 500 to 1,000 words.
Western Kentucky’s BSN-to-DNP family nurse practitioner concentration is 76 credit hours, with both full-time and part-time options, and the wider program requirement runs from 36 to 76 hours depending on which end you enter at. The prerequisite that catches people out is not the grade point average, though that is a 3.0. It is anatomy and physiology, where the university wants a minimum of six credit hours graded B or above. A pass is not enough. If your A and P is old or was scraped through first time, that is the thing to check before anything else, because it is the one requirement you cannot fix inside an application cycle.
Augsburg runs a 33-credit transcultural nursing doctorate over two to three years, with full-time and part-time options and a single fall start. The focus is stated rather than implied: holistic practice modalities, immersion experiences and independent practicums, which is a different emphasis from the systems-leadership framing most programs use. The bachelor’s track is built by exemption, completing every master’s course except four specifically named ones, so what you take is defined against an existing degree rather than assembled fresh. For a private university of about 3,200 students it confers a substantial number of nursing doctorates a year, which places it in the upper third nationally for output against size.
Virginia publishes a 33-month full-time route from a BSN and five to six years if you go part time, which is a wider spread than most schools will admit to. The neonatal concentration attaches 14 credits and 750 hours of direct care practicum on top of the core, specialty courses and electives, and how long the whole thing takes still turns on whether you entered with a bachelor’s or a master’s. One route is restricted rather than merely selective: the combined adult-gerontology acute care clinical nurse specialist and nurse practitioner track is open to military students only and runs 36 months. If you are not eligible for that one, the real choice is narrower than the concentration list suggests.
Tennessee Tech does not run its doctorate alone. It is a joint program with East Tennessee State, which means the faculty pool and the course catalog are larger than a single campus this size could support, and it is the reason a university best known for engineering can offer a nursing doctorate at all. Delivery is blended, mixing online coursework with in-person elements. The school flags a condition that catches distance students out: the regulatory requirements governing student clinical placement vary by state and change over time, so where you may legally do your hours is a question to settle with the program before you enroll. School-wide average graduate tuition here, which excludes DNP add-on charges, sits in the lowest third of the 306 accredited institutions that publish a rate, in the 2023-24 federal figures.
4 DNP tracks at this
institution, Family nurse practitioner, Geriatric, Nursing practice (general), Psychiatric-mental health NP. Ranked once, on the largest.
George Washington files four DNP specialties, family, geriatric, psychiatric mental health and a general track, and delivers them in a hybrid shape: coursework online with some on-campus time for testing and skills training. Online here means most of it rather than all of it, and the on-campus days are the ones that need planning if you are traveling in. Clinical hour requirements are set per specialty rather than across the degree, so the specialty page is where the real number lives. 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.
Touro Nevada runs a leadership doctorate and does not pretend otherwise. Its 528 practicum hours are leadership-based and built to support the scholarly project rather than to deliver direct patient care. That is coherent for a post-master’s leadership degree, and worth checking against your board’s expectations if you need clinical hours for a certification. The pace is an explicit choice rather than a negotiation: an accelerated track of one year full-time, or a standard track of two years part-time. Coursework combines didactic and practicum work aimed at leading in varied practice settings, collaborating across professions to improve patient care, and building strategy in advanced practice areas. It suits a nurse already in or moving toward a management role.
Azusa Pacific attaches its experience requirement to a point inside the program rather than to admission. The family nurse practitioner track wants eight months of work as a registered nurse before you begin the second year of courses, so you can be admitted while you are still accumulating it, which is not how most schools handle the same requirement. The residency requirement is 1,000 hours, and the school counts leadership experience toward that total alongside clinical work, a broader definition than programs treating the whole thing as patient contact. Admitted students hold their place in the cohort with a nonrefundable deposit, so the commitment lands earlier than at schools admitting on a rolling basis.
7 DNP tracks at this
institution, Adult health, Family nurse practitioner, Maternal/Child Health and Neonatal Nurse/Nursing, Nursing practice (general), Pediatric, Psychiatric-mental health NP, Women's Health Nurse/Nursing. Ranked once, on the largest.
Duke files more separate DNP records with the federal survey than any other institution in this dataset, eight of them, which is a fair signal of how many distinct routes sit under one program name. Its MSN-to-DNP is distance-based, with coursework completed from wherever you are. Admission is broader than most: it takes a master’s in nursing from a CCNE- or ACEN-accredited program, but it will also take a master’s in a related health field, so a graduate degree from outside nursing does not rule you out here the way it does at a lot of schools. Among the specialties is a nurse innovator and entrepreneur track whose three specialty courses all run online.
Palm Beach Atlantic runs its doctorate as a single practitioner track, adult-gerontology primary care, and the point of that track is the credential waiting at the end. Finishing it makes you eligible to sit the national certification examination through either the American Nurses Credentialing Center or the American Association of Nurse Practitioners. Choosing a school with one track rather than six is a narrower decision than it looks, because the faculty and the clinical placements are all pointed at the same patient population instead of being split across several. The program carries no distance flag in its federal filing, so plan on being in West Palm Beach rather than at a distance.
Lowell publishes a separate degree pathway for master’s-prepared nurses who are not advanced practice registered nurses, a group most schools leave to work out their own plan. If your master’s was in education, administration or informatics, there is a named route here rather than a case-by-case negotiation. The scholarly project splits into three graded courses covering design, implementation, and dissemination with advocacy and policy, so the work is paced across the program instead of saved for the end. Before clinical rotations you work in simulation labs using high-fidelity manikins and trained actors as simulated patients. The catalog publishes a pathway per entry year, so the plan you are held to is the one in force when you start.
California Baptist runs its doctorate as an indirect care, systems leadership degree entered from a master’s, which means it prepares you to change how care is delivered rather than to treat a new population. The shape is 36 to 45 units over two years and six terms, part-time, taught asynchronously online with mandatory on-campus residencies three or four times across the program. Admission wants a 3.0 cumulative average and verification of the supervised practicum hours your master’s included, and it will consider a master’s in another discipline. The application itself asks you to name a problem worth doctoral work and a project that would address it, so the school expects you to arrive with the work already in mind.
Arkansas runs its doctorate online and keeps the clinical work where you already live: you work with approved preceptors in your own locale, arranged in conjunction with faculty rather than assigned to a distant site. Campus visits are minimal and include a mandatory one-time program orientation, so there is exactly one trip you cannot avoid. Bachelor’s entry carries a single concentration, family nurse practitioner, and finishing it makes you eligible to sit for national certification. One concentration rather than six means the faculty and the placements all point at primary care across the lifespan, a narrower but more focused proposition than a school running several tracks at once.
Emory takes you in at two points, from a bachelor’s or an entry-level master’s in nursing, or from a master’s you already hold, and the pace depends on which specialty and which entry you pick rather than being fixed for everyone. Delivery is distance-based: online courses broken by in-person intensives, so plan on traveling to Atlanta on a schedule the specialty sets. There is also a master of nursing pathway for people coming into nursing from another field who intend to continue to the doctorate, which makes this one of the few places you can start as a non-nurse and finish with a practice doctorate. Emory files a nurse anesthesia specialty beside the general one. 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.
Saint Anthony sets a lower academic bar than most, asking a cumulative grade point average of 2.8 rather than the usual 3.0, which makes it a genuine option for a nurse whose transcript would rule them out elsewhere. The trade is time: the program runs part-time by design and takes four to six years depending on which option you take. Three of those exist. The adult-gerontology practitioner route is open from a bachelor’s or a master’s, the leadership route in macro and micro healthcare systems is post-master’s only, and there is a psychiatric mental health practitioner doctorate. The college is attached to a hospital system, and admission includes a background check, health history, immunization records and drug screening.
Lenoir-Rhyne points its doctorate at psychiatric mental health, and the track ends with eligibility to sit for board certification as a psychiatric mental health nurse practitioner. The clinical requirement runs past 1,000 hours, pairing direct clinical work with the doctoral project rather than treating them as two separate obligations. Psychiatric mental health is where the shortage of practitioners is sharpest, so a college running that track specifically is making a different bet from one running a general doctorate. The program carries no distance flag in its federal filing, so plan on Hickory. Against its size Lenoir-Rhyne confers nursing doctorates at a rate in the top quarter of accredited institutions, which is more than a college of 2,300 students usually manages.
Indianapolis publishes a credit total and an hour total for every track, which makes comparing them unusually easy. The two bachelor’s-entry practitioner tracks, family and adult-gerontology primary care, are each 62 credit hours with 1,050 to 1,250 clinical and practicum hours. The executive track is 31 to 36 credit hours against 1,000 practicum hours, and the post-master’s track uses the same credit range against 500 to 1,000 hours. Pace is where they part company. Family and post-master’s take you full-time or part-time, while adult-gerontology primary care and the executive track are part-time only, so if your plan was to push through quickly, those two will not let you. Admission wants a 3.0 cumulative grade point average and two years of full-time work before practicum hours start.
Hopkins calls the advanced practice doctorate online, and then adds the condition that decides it: from the fall 2024 intake you have to be living in Maryland or Washington DC by the third semester, because that is where the clinical placements are. Read that before anything else. The adult-gerontological acute care track runs 70 credits with 840 clinical hours plus 160 project practicum hours, and wants a year of full-time RN work with unstable, technology-dependent patients in intensive, intermediate, progressive, stepdown or telemetry care before you start. Nurse anesthesia is taught on site rather than online, and applies in a different cycle: 1 September for a summer start against 1 November and 15 January for the practitioner tracks. Undergraduate statistics has to be a B, and the school says a B minus will not be accepted.
Belmont’s transfer policy is the reason to look at it. It accepts up to 20 credit hours of prior graduate coursework, where most schools cap transfer at around six, and it publishes worked examples rather than leaving you to ask. An applicant holding a BSN and an MBA can enter the post-master’s track and have that business coursework substitute for health care finance and for leadership and management. If you already hold a graduate degree in something adjacent, that is the difference between starting from scratch and starting a third of the way in. The clinical requirement then depends on track: family nurse practitioner students complete a minimum of 800 hours across the lifespan, and leadership and innovation students complete 700, mapped to the American Organization for Nursing Leadership competencies.
Boise State offers something most schools do not: if you already hold an advanced practice degree, whether as a nurse anesthetist, practitioner or midwife, the post-master’s doctorate carries no clinical component at all. That is the fastest honest route to the credential for someone already practicing, and the school states it plainly rather than burying it in a transfer policy. Bachelor’s entry specializes in adult-gerontology acute care or family practice, runs nationwide, and blends online coursework with annual in-person summer intensives. A dedicated placement team arranges the clinical sites rather than leaving you to it. There is no out-of-state tuition, and you can start full-time in the fall or part-time in the spring.
Georgia College runs its DNP as three years of full-time study across nine semesters. That is a fixed shape rather than a range, so you can plan against it from the day you apply, which is more than most schools give you. The flexibility sits in the transfer rule instead: up to nine credit hours can come across from prior graduate work, but that is at the joint discretion of the program advisor, the coordinator and the department chair rather than an entitlement. Three people have to agree, so treat it as a conversation to have before you apply rather than a box to tick afterwards. The federal filing flags the program for distance study.
2 DNP tracks at this
institution, Nursing practice (general), Psychiatric-mental health NP. Ranked once, on the largest.
Dartmouth restricts this program to New England and says so precisely. Your registered nurse license must be from Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts or Rhode Island, your permanent residence must be in one of those states, and your supervised clinical hours have to happen there as well. All three conditions, not one of them. If you sit outside that footprint, stop here. For everyone inside it the arrangement is unusually clean: classes are asynchronous and fully remote except for one on-campus day each semester. The adult-gerontology primary care route from a bachelor’s runs on a four or five year plan, and the four-year version totals 1,008 practicum hours. Publishing an exact hour total against a named plan is rarer than it should be.
Bay Path publishes both routes as course counts, which is a more honest unit than years. Bachelor’s entry is 70 credits across 19 courses. Master’s entry is 36 credits across 12 courses. Both carry 1,000 supervised clinical hours, and that is the part worth noticing: holding a master’s halves the coursework here without reducing the clinical requirement, which is not how every school handles it. Everything runs online, the family practitioner track included, so the clinical hours are the only part that happens in a building. Bay Path is small, and against its size it confers nursing doctorates at a rate in the top quarter nationally, so the program is a serious piece of what the university does.
Iowa publishes its clinical load per semester rather than as one total, which is the number that actually tells you whether the degree fits around a job. Fall and spring each carry 180 clinical hours if you are in the adult-gerontology primary care, pediatric or family tracks, and 270 if you are in psychiatric mental health or adult-gerontology acute care. Summer flips it for family nurse practitioners: 270 there, against 180 for the others. So the family route runs lighter through the main terms and heavier in summer, while psychiatric and acute care carry half again as much all year. Map that against your roster before comparing programs on their total hours.
3 DNP tracks at this
institution, Family nurse practitioner, Nursing practice (general), Psychiatric-mental health NP. Ranked once, on the largest.
UMass Global’s catalog carries a course most schools would rather you did not read about: a zero-credit independent practicum for students who still need to finish their doctoral project hours or the manuscript, and it carries a continuing candidacy fee. It is graded pass or no pass and needs your project chair’s permission. Projects overrun, and this is what it costs when yours does. The rest is straightforward. Three routes run, a post-master’s base track, a post-master’s route that adds a clinical specialty, and a bachelor’s entry, each with clinical residency courses attached. A gap analysis or degree audit can add an independent doctoral topic credit, so what you take is set against your record rather than fixed in advance.
UT Health San Antonio publishes the conversion most schools leave implicit: one semester credit hour of practicum equals four clock hours a week for that semester, and the ratio holds across every DNP track. Multiply it out before you enroll and you will know what a six-credit practicum term actually costs you in time, which is the calculation that decides whether a program fits around shift work. The school also publishes doctoral graduation rates and average time to degree by cohort instead of leaving you to ask. This is a health science center with no undergraduate arts college attached, so everyone around you is in a health profession. School-wide average graduate tuition here, which excludes DNP add-on charges, sits in the cheapest tenth of the 306 accredited institutions that publish a rate, in the 2023-24 federal figures, and the out-of-state rate is about 4 times the in-state one, so residency matters a great deal.
5 DNP tracks at this
institution, Critical care, Family nurse practitioner, Nursing administration, Nursing practice (general), Psychiatric-mental health NP. Ranked once, on the largest.
South Carolina publishes a semester count for every route, and the spread is wide enough to matter. The post-master’s clinical expert major is 33 credits over six semesters. Healthcare leadership runs 36 to 39 credits over seven. Nursing education is the widest of them, 33 to 60 hours over six to nine semesters, because what you need depends on what you arrive holding. From a BSN the commitment is different in kind: those options run nine, eleven or twelve semesters depending on the route, which is three to four years before you account for anything slipping. Full-time and part-time plans of study are published for the BSN entry point.
Winston-Salem State publishes both totals and both clocks, which makes the two routes easy to weigh against each other. Bachelor’s entry runs 78 semester hours with a minimum of 1,182 clinical hours and points at family nurse practitioner work, spread over six semesters and two summers, so about three years. Master’s entry runs 33 semester hours with a minimum of 510 clinical hours and takes roughly two years and a summer. The distance between 1,182 hours and 510 is the entire argument for finishing a master’s first if you are weighing the two routes. School-wide average graduate tuition here, which excludes DNP add-on charges, sits in the cheapest tenth of the 306 accredited institutions that publish a rate, in the 2023-24 federal figures, and the out-of-state rate is about 3.5 times the in-state one, so residency matters a great deal.
Dominican builds its doctorate around a residency rather than a capstone bolted on at the end. A one-credit course introduces the residency, and Residency I carries four credits, pairing clinical practicum with scholarly work so the project grows inside supervised practice instead of running alongside it. That structure matters if you want the doctoral project to be something you do at work rather than a paper you write after hours. This is a small university of about 1,400 students, and against that size it confers nursing doctorates at one of the higher rates in the country. The program carries no distance flag in its federal filing, so plan on being in Orangeburg rather than at a distance.
Texas Woman’+A+’s requires 540 practicum hours in your chosen area of clinical expertise plus a scholarly project, and it assesses at admission how many hours a post-master’+A+’s student is bringing forward. That assessment is the thing to settle early, because it decides how much of the 1,000-hour requirement you still owe. Provisional admission exists for applicants at or just above a 3.0: the first 12 credit hours must be passed at B or better, at least six of them in nursing. The program carries a distance-education flag. School-wide average graduate tuition here, which excludes DNP add-on charges, sits in the cheapest tenth of the 306 accredited institutions that publish a rate, in the 2023-24 federal figures.
5 DNP tracks at this
institution, Emergency and trauma, Family nurse practitioner, Nursing administration, Nursing practice (general), Psychiatric-mental health NP. Ranked once, on the largest.
Samford files six separate DNP records federally, covering nurse anesthesia, family practice, psychiatric mental health, emergency and trauma, nursing administration and a general track. That much specialty breadth is unusual for a private university of about 6,000 students, and it puts Samford in the top tenth of accredited institutions both for the number of nursing doctorates it confers and for how many it confers against its size. The nurse anesthesia program is accredited by the Council on Accreditation of Nurse Anesthesia Educational Programs, and the next review is scheduled for spring 2035, which is settled well past the length of any program you would start now. The nurse leader track pairs online coursework with practicum blocks you attend in person.
Eastern Kentucky builds its post-master’s doctorate around short terms: two seven-week blocks in fall and spring and two six-week blocks over summer, so you carry two classes at a time and still count as full-time. Two courses at once is a very different load from four, and it is the structural reason this fits around a roster. The doctoral project can be done inside your own organization or community rather than at a site the school assigns, and you are given a mentor for it. Everything runs online. Textbooks come through a program charging a flat rate per credit hour, a smaller saving than tuition but a predictable one. School-wide average graduate tuition here, which excludes DNP add-on charges, sits in the lowest third of the 306 accredited institutions that publish a rate, in the 2023-24 federal figures.
2 DNP tracks at this
institution, Nursing administration, Nursing practice (general). Ranked once, on the largest.
Duquesne’+A+’s DNP is hybrid, and its nurse anesthesia curriculum rotates you through adult, pediatric, obstetric and ambulatory anesthesia rather than concentrating in one setting, which is the breadth a certification exam assumes. Nineteen doctorates a year from a private university of 8,234 in Pittsburgh puts it among the more established programs in western Pennsylvania, and federal records flag it for distance study. Pittsburgh has three accredited institutions to Philadelphia’+A+’s eleven, so the local competition for preceptors is thinner at one end of the state than the other. The nurse anesthesia route is a 92-credit plan across nine semesters and 36 months, and it wants two years of critical care behind you before you start. A residency does not count toward that two years.
2 DNP tracks at this
institution, Family nurse practitioner, Registered nursing (general). Ranked once, on the largest.
Mary files two DNP records federally, one under family nurse practitioner and one general, and both carry a distance flag, so the doctorate is built to be taken from wherever you already work. Against a student body of under four thousand, it confers nursing doctorates at a rate in the top sixth of accredited institutions nationally, which is a lot of doctoral output for a small Catholic university in Bismarck and suggests the program is central to what the place does. The ladder beneath it runs from a registered nurse bachelor’s completion through master’s routes in nursing leadership and nurse education, so you can enter at several points.
Hawaii Pacific teaches the coursework entirely online and keeps the practicum in person, which is the honest version of what most online doctorates actually are. Two entries run, one from a bachelor’s in nursing and one from a master’s. The unit became a school of nursing in its own right in January 2022, so the doctorate sits inside something relatively young and visibly still building. Further down the ladder it runs a route for military hospital corpsmen to convert service experience into a bachelor’s, which is unusual and says something about who the school serves. The Commission on Collegiate Nursing Education accredits the bachelor’s, the master’s, the doctorate and the post-graduate certificates.
Indiana publishes both routes with their clinical hours attached, and the difference between them is starker than the credit counts suggest. From a BSN the degree is 66 credit hours and 1,005 clinical hours, and the university puts the fastest completion at three years. From a master’s the post-MSN route is a minimum of 38 credit hours, but it still carries 1,000 total clinical practicum hours. So holding a master’s roughly halves your coursework and barely touches the clinical requirement, because those hours count across your whole post-baccalaureate education rather than starting again. That is the single most useful thing to understand before you compare a post-master’s route anywhere.
Valparaiso teaches the coursework asynchronously online and keeps the clinical training in person, which is the standard honest arrangement rather than a claim of a fully remote doctorate. Two paths run, one from a bachelor’s and one from a master’s. The university files its doctorate under a family nurse practitioner specialty, so the clinical destination is primary care across the lifespan rather than a systems or leadership role. This is a small private university and the doctoral output reflects it, so expect a cohort measured in single figures and faculty with room to accommodate individual pacing.
Valdosta State runs a post-master’s doctorate at 38 credit hours over five semesters, online, aimed at advanced practice nurses who are still working. The unusual provision sits in the bachelor’s-entry route: you can opt out at semester seven with a master’s in hand, then return within three years to finish the last three semesters and take the doctorate. That is an exit with something to show for it, which matters if your circumstances change midway, and very few schools build one in. School-wide average graduate tuition here, which excludes DNP add-on charges, sits in the cheapest tenth of the 306 accredited institutions that publish a rate, in the 2023-24 federal figures, and the out-of-state rate is about 3.5 times the in-state one, so residency matters a great deal.
San Jose State runs a five-semester post-master’s doctorate and is precise about the campus commitment, which is the number that actually decides whether an online program is workable. Three on-campus meetings across the whole degree: orientation at the start, one midway, and the oral defense and graduation at the end of the fifth semester. Everything else is online. Admission is by cohort in the fall only, and your master’s has to be finished by 1 August before you start, so a degree still in progress that spring is cutting it fine. A master’s in a health-related field can qualify you as well as one in nursing. Project defenses are held publicly, which shows you what the end of this program looks like before you begin it.
Oklahoma Wesleyan runs its BSN-to-DNP one course at a time in eight-week blocks, which is a genuinely different shape from a semester load and takes about three years end to end. Taking a single course at once means you are never juggling three deadlines, and it also means falling behind in one course stalls the whole sequence rather than a part of it. The other thing worth knowing is who it lets in. Applicants holding a diploma from a hospital school of nursing can transfer in 40 credit hours, which is an unusually explicit accommodation for nurses who trained before the bachelor’s became the standard entry.
Samuel Merritt is a health sciences university rather than a campus with a nursing school attached, and its doctoral output against its size is among the highest in the country: about 1,900 students in total and forty-six nursing doctorates a year. The routes are counted in units rather than years. The post-master’s doctorate needs a minimum of 30 semester units and the family nurse practitioner doctorate needs 65, so what you already hold roughly halves the work. Graduation also turns on finishing the clinical hours set for your specialty track rather than one figure for the whole degree, which means the family and psychiatric mental health routes carry different totals and the track page is where those live.
Carlow runs a women’s health and gender-related nurse practitioner master’s alongside its family practice route, a specialization very few schools staff and a real alternative if that is the population you want to work with. The doctorate sits above them and is filed federally as a distance program. The psychiatric mental health practitioner route and its post-master’s certificate are taught online. This is a small Catholic university in Pittsburgh founded by the Sisters of Mercy, and its doctoral output against size sits in the top third of accredited institutions nationally, so the program is a genuine part of the place rather than an add-on.
Stockton teaches its nursing programs against simulation and assessment labs on campus and a clinical network spread across the region and the state, so placements are not concentrated in one hospital system. The ladder beneath the doctorate is unusually complete for a public university this size: an accelerated bachelor’s for people who already hold a degree in another field, a family nurse practitioner master’s, and a post-master’s certificate for nurses who want specialty certification without another degree. The doctorate carries no distance flag federally, so plan on being in Galloway. It confers a small number of degrees a year, so the cohort is compact.
Mount St. Joseph keeps its doctorate short and online: 36 credit hours, taught in an online format, accredited by the Commission on Collegiate Nursing Education. Thirty-six credits is a post-master’s shape, which tells you who it is for before the admissions page does, namely nurses who have already done the clinical core somewhere else. This is a small university of about 2,300 students in Cincinnati, and its doctoral output against its size sits in the top third nationally, so the program is a real part of what the place does rather than something bolted on. Since everything runs online, the Cincinnati address matters less than it looks.
Northern Arizona wants 74 to 79 graduate units for a doctorate entered from a master’s, a much heavier load than the thirty-something most post-master’s routes ask for, and that is the first thing to weigh here. On top of it sit 1,000 hours of clinical practice. The condition that catches people out is documentary: accepted students must obtain an official letter, sent directly from the institution that awarded their master’s, stating the actual number of clinical hours completed. Chasing a former registrar for that takes time, so start early. The program runs online and points its leadership training at rural and underserved populations. Admission wants a 3.0 in your bachelor’s and a 3.0 across all nursing coursework in the master’s.
Houston caps what you can carry forward, and the number is worth checking before you compare it with anywhere else. The maximum clinical hours it will accept from an MSN is 500, whatever you actually logged. So if your master’s carried 700 or 800 practicum hours, two or three hundred of them stop counting the moment you enroll here, and the post-master’s DNP still runs 37 to 42 credit hours over eight semesters. Against a school that applies your full master’s total against the 1,000, that is a real difference in time rather than a technicality. Eight semesters is the published shape whichever end of the credit range you land on.
Anderson publishes format, duration and start date for each route side by side, and they differ more than the shared name suggests. Executive leadership from an MSN is fully online and 18 months, and it accepts a master’s in nursing in any field of study rather than demanding a matching specialty. The family nurse practitioner route from a BSN is hybrid rather than online, and three years. Psychiatric mental health runs alongside it. Every route starts in August, so there is one intake a year whichever you pick, and it is the credential you enter with rather than the specialty you want that decides how long you are committing to.
Messiah runs three doctoral tracks online, family nurse practitioner, nurse educator and nursing leadership, and the leadership one is written for nurses who already hold a master’s in nursing or a related field. The practitioner route is the heavy one, published at 82 credits with 1,215 clinical hours, which is a bachelor’s-entry load rather than a top-up. Messiah also advertises no-fee tuition, meaning the published rate is the rate rather than a base you add course and technology charges to, and that is worth checking against whatever you compare it with. It is a small private university, so the doctoral cohort is small, and every track is taught online rather than in Mechanicsburg.
Prairie View is a historically Black university whose college of nursing publishes its outcomes rather than keeping them internal: employment a year after graduation, first-attempt licensure pass rates, and on-time completion, each reported by cohort year. Schools that publish completion rates alongside pass rates are giving you the harder number as well as the flattering one. A doctoral student here was selected as a Jonas Scholar for 2024 to 2026, which is a national award for nurses working on projects in priority areas. The doctorate is accredited by the Commission on Collegiate Nursing Education and carries no distance flag federally. School-wide average graduate tuition here, which excludes DNP add-on charges, sits in the cheapest tenth of the 306 accredited institutions that publish a rate, in the 2023-24 federal figures, and the out-of-state rate is about 3 times the in-state one, so residency matters a great deal.
Marymount separates its two kinds of hours and publishes both: 750 direct patient care hours and 500 project hours. Counting them apart is more honest than one combined figure, because patient-facing work and the doctoral project make very different demands on a week. Bachelor’s entry leads to either family practice or psychiatric mental health certification, and the whole thing runs online. The program is explicit about its Catholic tradition and a servant leadership framing, which is information about the cohort you would join rather than a line of marketing. The Commission on Collegiate Nursing Education accredits the bachelor’s, the master’s, the post-master’s certificates and the doctorate.
Gonzaga answers plainly the question a lot of schools leave fuzzy: this doctorate will not make you a nurse practitioner. It is a general post-master’s degree meant to add doctoral preparation to the specialty you already hold, and if you want a new clinical specialty the university points you at a second master’s instead. Knowing that up front saves a wasted application. Admission wants a 3.3 grade point average across your master’s-level nursing courses, with a written explanation if you fall short, plus verification of the practicum hours your master’s included. The application also asks you to name a project topic you care about and say why it matters, so arrive with one. The deadline is 1 February and everything runs online.
Pittsburg State charges online students the resident in-state rate regardless of where they actually live, and that removes the single biggest variable from the cost of a public university doctorate. Here it is not, provided you are in a program the university has designated as online. That is a standing policy rather than a discount round, so it applies for the length of the program rather than for a year, and it is the main reason to look at this school from outside Kansas.
Mississippi University for Women puts its BSN-to-DNP at as few as eight terms, about 33 months, which is quick for a route that starts from a bachelor’s where three to four years is the norm. Terms rather than semesters is the tell: the calendar is built around shorter blocks, so the pace comes from density rather than from cutting content. It is a small public university that confers a modest number of doctorates a year, so expect a small cohort rather than a large program. School-wide average graduate tuition here, which excludes DNP add-on charges, sits in the lowest fifth of the 306 accredited institutions that publish a rate, in the 2023-24 federal figures, and the out-of-state rate is barely higher, which is unusual for a public university.
Union runs three doctoral tracks that lead to genuinely different work: executive leadership, nurse anesthesia, and nurse practitioner practice. It is a Christian university and states that the program integrates faith with professional preparation, which is worth knowing about the cohort you would join rather than reading as a marketing line. Beside the doctorate sit post-graduate certificates in nursing administration, family practice and psychiatric mental health, so a nurse who already holds a master’s can add a specialty without committing to the whole degree. The Commission on Collegiate Nursing Education accredits the bachelor’s, the master’s, the doctorate and the certificate programs here, so the full ladder is covered rather than only the top of it.
Delaware publishes its clinical hours split by type, which almost nobody does. The adult-gerontology acute care concentration is 68 credit hours and 1,016 clinical hours, and it tells you that 816 of those are direct care against 200 indirect. That distinction is worth more than it looks, because a program quoting one large number may be counting hours you would not describe as patient contact. The hours sit inside the core and concentration courses rather than being bolted on afterwards. The psychiatric mental health concentration runs hybrid, and its on-campus intensives run simulation with trained student actors rather than standardized patients alone.
Detroit Mercy runs two very different programs under one roof. The post-master’s doctorate builds on a master’s in nursing and takes 36 credits, part-time or full-time. The nurse anesthesia route is another thing entirely, and its first year is unusual: 9 to 13 credits a term for the first 12 months with no clinical component at all. A full year of classroom work before you touch a patient is a real structural choice, and it means the front of that program is not something you fit around shifts. Against its size, Detroit Mercy confers nursing doctorates at a rate in the top quarter of accredited institutions.
Westminster front-loads the remote part of its nurse anesthesia doctorate: the first two semesters are fully online and completed from wherever you are, and the clinical years follow. That order matters if you are still working, because it means the disruption arrives on a schedule you can see coming rather than immediately. It is a small private university in Salt Lake City of roughly 1,150 students, so the cohort you join is small by construction, and its federal filing carries no distance-education flag for the degree as a whole. Read that as a campus-based program with an online opening rather than an online one.
Saint Louis makes both campus visits count, which is unusual. The first is a two-day residency where the school assesses your diagnostic reasoning, clinical assessment skills and therapeutic communication rather than simply orienting you. The second comes at the end, to present the doctoral project. Bachelor’s entry runs 62 to 68 credits depending on your population focus, across four years, ending at 1,000 clinical hours. The post-master’s route is 30 credits online, with five or six credits of comparable graduate coursework transferable at the school’s discretion. Preceptors are handled through a three-tier process rather than left to you, and you are paired with a faculty mentor in your field. Check the state approval list, because approvals here are granted program by program.
Edgewood runs two doctorates with different accreditors and different purposes. The nurse anesthesia program is new, launched in 2025, accredited by the Council on Accreditation of Nurse Anesthesia Educational Programs, and it leads to eligibility for the national certification examination and licensure as a certified registered nurse anesthetist. The executive leadership doctorate is the older one, accredited by the Commission on Collegiate Nursing Education and approved by the Wisconsin Board of Nursing. It needs a minimum of 30 credits over two years full-time, and the practicum is sized to you, between 500 and 1,000 hours depending on what your master’s already covered. Its coursework runs to epidemiology, biostatistics, healthcare finance, informatics and quality management, so it is a management degree in substance as well as in name.
Misericordia has taught nursing for more than 75 years and carries Commission on Collegiate Nursing Education accreditation across the bachelor’s, master’s, post-graduate advanced practice certificate and the doctorate. Against a student body of a few thousand, its doctoral output sits in the top quarter of accredited institutions nationally, which is more than a university this size usually manages and suggests the program is a priority rather than an afterthought. The doctorate carries no distance flag in its federal filing, so plan on being in Dallas, Pennsylvania. The university also publishes merit and need-based aid that can exceed twenty thousand dollars a year for students who qualify.
Morningside builds a second chance into admission, which almost no school does in writing. If you are turned down on grade point average, you may still register for coursework, and after 10 graduate credit hours at 3.0 or better you can be admitted. That turns a hard floor into a demonstrable one. Three tracks run, direct patient care, transformative leadership and adult-gerontology acute care, and each is open from either a bachelor’s or a master’s. Everything is online. Licensure carries a geographic condition: your registered nurse license must be from Iowa or a compact state, and anything else needs the dean’s approval, so settle that before you apply. A new graduate can start while still obtaining licensure, for one semester.
Point Loma splits the 1,000 clinical hours in a way few schools spell out: at least 500 must be direct patient care and 500 attach to the DNP project itself. If you assumed the project counted as paperwork rather than as practice hours, that changes the shape of the whole second half of the degree. The clinical nurse specialist route is fully asynchronous and runs 55 to 65 units depending on the prerequisites you arrive holding. Healthcare leadership from an MSN is 24 months, six semesters. Family nurse practitioner is the long one at 76 units and as many as ten semesters, and it is also the route with in-person requirements: two on-campus intensive weekends on top of clinicals, with synchronous sessions optional rather than required.
Rio Grande Valley runs a 45-credit doctorate delivered entirely online and finishing in about two and a half years. What makes it worth a look is who it will take: a nurse holding a bachelor’s with a registered nurse license, or one holding a master’s, or one already certified as an advanced practice registered nurse, all enter the same program. Schools usually split those applicants into separate tracks, and consolidating them is simpler to navigate if your background does not fit a standard box. The degree prepares graduates for leadership and administration or for advanced practice. It is a young program, launched in 2022, so it is still establishing rather than long settled.
Illinois State keeps its post-master’s doctorate compact: 34 credit hours and 360 clinical hours, taught online. Three hundred and sixty is a small clinical figure, and it only makes sense because the route assumes the bulk of your hours came with your master’s, so check what you already hold before treating it as the whole requirement. Two start points exist rather than one, with applications closing 15 April for a summer start and 15 July for fall. The college’s clinical partnerships run across central Illinois and reach past hospitals into long-term care, school districts and public health agencies, which widens the kinds of project a doctoral student can realistically take on.
Coppin State splits the clinical hours in a way worth knowing about: at least 300 have to be done inside this program, and up to 700 can transfer from an accredited master’s. The floor is 300 whatever you bring, and the transfer ceiling is generous next to schools that stop at 500. Entry runs from a bachelor’s in nursing accredited by the Accreditation Commission for Education in Nursing or the Commission on Collegiate Nursing Education, and the pathways run in a traditional or hybrid format rather than fully online. School-wide average graduate tuition here, which excludes DNP add-on charges, sits in the lowest fifth of the 306 accredited institutions that publish a rate, in the 2023-24 federal figures.
Southeastern Louisiana leaves preceptor and facility selection to you, and says so plainly. That is the opposite of a placement service, and it is the most useful thing on this card, because finding your own preceptor is the step that stalls people most often. Weigh it against the schools that place you before you decide. Campus time comes down to two events, orientation and the defense of your doctoral project, with coursework online in between. Those online courses go through a peer review certification the university calls the Course Alignment Process, which is more quality assurance than most programs bother to describe. The GRE is no longer required. Bachelor’s entry specializes in family practice, psychiatric mental health or the nurse executive route.
Auburn runs its doctorate as a hybrid program and is upfront about what that means: scheduled on-campus intensives you attend in person, with distance-learning delivery in between. Knowing there is a fixed campus obligation before you apply is the difference between a program that fits your life and one that quietly does not. The college publishes separate pages for admission and progression, curriculum models, graduate assistantships and scholarship information, so the funding routes are laid out rather than left to an advising appointment. Auburn’s doctoral output is small against the size of the university, so expect a compact cohort inside a large public institution.
Saint Francis runs its post-master’s doctorate entirely online and says plainly that students never need to come to campus, which is rarer than the phrase online program suggests. Two routes exist and they take different inputs. The clinical route wants an accredited master’s in nursing plus evidence of 500 practice hours. The leadership route accepts a nursing bachelor’s paired with a master’s in health administration or leadership, so a manager who never took a clinical master’s has a way in. State rules matter here: the college holds distance education permission for most states but not all, and an Arizona student needs a preceptor licensed in Arizona. Applications are taken year round, with priority dates of 1 April and 1 October.
Fresno State reviews applications on a rolling basis as they arrive rather than against one closing date, and everyone who progresses is interviewed by the doctoral program before an offer. An interview stage is worth preparing for, because it means the decision is not made on paper alone. Applications go through Cal State Apply, the system-wide portal, so the mechanics are the same as for any California State campus. School-wide average graduate tuition here, which excludes DNP add-on charges, sits in the lowest fifth of the 306 accredited institutions that publish a rate, in the 2023-24 federal figures. The doctorate is filed federally as a distance program and it is small, conferring a handful of degrees a year.
Drexel sets an entry floor other schools leave implicit: no fewer than 400 precepted practice hours completed during your graduate studies, documented on a verification form your previous program has to sign. If your master’s practicum fell short of that, you are not eligible yet, and it is worth checking that before anything else. The cumulative graduate grade point average floor is 3.2, above the usual 3.0. Two tracks run. The advanced clinical expert route requires you to already hold advanced practice national certification. The leadership route accepts advanced certification or the 400 documented hours in its place. The application asks you to identify a practice problem that intrigues you and say how the doctorate would help you fix it.
Cleveland State runs two entry points into the doctorate and three destinations: family practice and psychiatric mental health for people wanting certification, and a health systems leadership route open to nurses who already hold a master’s, which the university puts at two years and teaches entirely online. Two practical conditions come before any of that. Your state has to appear on the university’s authorization list for online enrollment, and the school points you at that list rather than assuming. And every online student, whatever their residency, pays a per-credit eLearning fee on top of tuition plus a one-off program fee in the first semester. Small charges, but they are not in the headline number.
3 DNP tracks at this
institution, Family nurse practitioner, Psychiatric-mental health NP, Registered nursing (general). Ranked once, on the largest.
San Francisco runs its doctorate at three locations, San Francisco, Sacramento and Orange County, which is unusual for a private university and means a California applicant may have a campus within reach without moving. Two clinical routes run, family practice and psychiatric mental health, and both are filed federally as campus programs rather than distance ones, so the location question here is real rather than nominal. The regular application deadline is 15 May across all three sites. 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.
Saint Joseph attaches a deadline to your own history that almost no school does. If you finished a master’s in nursing here and enroll within three years of completing it, the doctorate is six courses and 18 credits across three semesters. Leave it longer and you are on the standard route, 45 credits over two to four years against a plan of study the program approves. Three years is the whole difference between a year of study and three, so if you are weighing whether to keep going, the clock is already running. Admission wants a 3.2 in the master’s, a certification form documenting your previous supervised clinical hours signed by that program’s director, and an essay about a health issue in your own community.
Loyola attaches a certification condition to its acute care route that catches people out: every adult-gerontology acute care practitioner and clinical nurse specialist student has to obtain CCRN certification before clinical work starts. That is an exam to sit and pass on top of the application, and recent intensive care experience as a registered nurse is required to get in at all. Plan for both. The school also runs an oncology certificate alongside its other post-graduate certificates, which is a specialization few nursing schools staff. Applications to the certificate programs are accepted at any time for an upcoming open term rather than against a single annual deadline, which makes starting easier to time around work.
Rhode Island builds its post-master’s doctorate around traditional, complementary and integrative health, a genuine curricular commitment rather than a marketing angle, and one that sets it apart from the leadership-and-systems framing almost every other program uses. If integrative approaches are already part of how you practice, this is one of the few doctorates that treats that as the core rather than an elective. The program runs online. It is scoped to nurses who already hold a master’s, so the clinical core is assumed to be behind you and the emphasis falls on leadership and on applying evidence to patient-centered care.
3 DNP tracks at this
institution, Family nurse practitioner, Nursing practice (general), Psychiatric-mental health NP. Ranked once, on the largest.
Fairfield files five DNP specialties, and two of them, nurse anesthesia and nurse midwifery, are programs most universities do not attempt at all. The post-master’s doctorate is 30 to 32 credits and you can take it online or hybrid. The midwifery application is where the school shows its hand: it asks for a three-page personal statement covering why you want to be a nurse midwife, your goals for the next five to ten years, and what you intend to contribute to the profession. That is a lot of writing for an application, and it filters for people who have thought past the credential. The psychiatric mental health track carries the coursework needed to sit for certification through the American Nurses Credentialing Center.
Kent State is explicit about who goes to the front of the queue for its nurse executive concentration. Priority admission goes to candidates already holding ANCC or AONL nurse executive certification, or who have worked in nursing management or administration. That is a useful signal in both directions. If you have that background you are competing on favorable terms, and if you do not, this is a concentration you enter from behind rather than level with everyone else. Post-master’s students complete a minimum of 500 practicum hours, so half of the 1,000 the degree standard sets is expected to have traveled with you from your master’s.
Mount Carmel inverts the usual order: your specialty track is decided by the evidence-based practice project you end up doing, rather than chosen at application. You commit to the program first and the specialization follows from the work, which suits someone who knows the problem they want to solve better than the label they want on it. The program runs as a cohort over 18 months and five semesters, online, and the project can be carried out in your own workplace. Admission is stricter than most: a 3.25 cumulative graduate grade point average, and two references of which at least one must be doctorally prepared and one must come from a nurse holding a master’s or a doctorate.
4 DNP tracks at this
institution, Adult health, Family nurse practitioner, Maternal/Child Health and Neonatal Nurse/Nursing, Pediatric. Ranked once, on the largest.
Stony Brook is only taking advanced standing applicants at present, which narrows the field sharply: you need a master’s as an advanced nurse practitioner or a certified nurse midwife to apply at all. On that route the program is 42 credits with a minimum of 500 scholarly practice hours, counted toward the 1,000 post-baccalaureate hours the degree requires. The full program, when it is open, is 87 credits against the same 1,000-hour floor. Registered nurse licensure has to be in place before the fall semester starts rather than at application. Doctoral students must carry their own malpractice insurance, a real cost most schools never mention. The grade point average floor is 3.0, and three letters of recommendation are asked for.
Salisbury counts your master’s and its own doctorate together toward one total: the project and 1,000 clinical hours are reached across both, so hours logged while earning the master’s carry forward rather than being set aside. For a nurse who already did a substantial practicum, that is the difference between a manageable addition and starting the clock again. The post-master’s doctorate is filed federally as a distance program. School-wide average graduate tuition here, which excludes DNP add-on charges, sits in the lowest fifth of the 306 accredited institutions that publish a rate, in the 2023-24 federal figures.
William Paterson runs one doctorate and is precise about it: a post-master’s DNP taught online, 38 credit hours, finishing in as few as 30 months. Thirty-eight credits is a middling load for a post-master’s route, and 30 months is the floor rather than the average, so read it as what the sequence allows when nothing goes wrong. The wider school of nursing matters if you are still choosing a master’s first. Its family nurse practitioner track runs 47 credits full-time or part-time, and it also runs a school nurse program that carries an Educational Services Endorsement once the 24 credits are done. School nursing is a different job from advanced clinical practice, and few universities run both routes inside one college.
Lewis runs four clinical practitioner tracks from a bachelor’s, adult-gerontology acute and primary care, family, and psychiatric mental health, plus a leadership track for people not heading into direct practice. The delivery split rewards a close read. Coursework is online, but annual immersion events and the health assessment labs happen at the Oak Brook location, and the residency and project implementation courses happen in person at whichever practice setting you use. So this degree takes place in three different kinds of place, not one. If Oak Brook is a long trip for you, that annual commitment is the thing to price before applying, because it repeats every year rather than happening once.
Charles R. Drew runs a 40-credit DNP on a cohort model, so you move through it with the same group rather than assembling a schedule of your own. The format is precepted clinical placements alongside online coursework, and the weekend structure is published rather than left vague: three hours of synchronous class followed by twelve hours of asynchronous study. That ratio is the useful part, because it tells you the live commitment is small and the independent one is not, which is the reverse of how most hybrid programs are described to you. The program holds CCNE accreditation, awarded after the degree launched rather than carried across from an existing one.
Northeastern’s post-master’s doctorate is 30 semester hours and primarily online. What the catalog shows clearly is how the doctoral work is structured: three sequential scholarly project courses covering design and ethical considerations, then implementation and outcomes, then dissemination. Splitting the project across three graded courses means it gets paced through the program rather than left to pile up at the end. Three of the thirty hours are electives you choose in consultation with a faculty advisor, which is a small amount of real flexibility inside an otherwise fixed sequence. The program sits within a health sciences college rather than a standalone nursing school, so the people around you come from across the health professions.
Auburn Montgomery teaches its graduate nursing programs online, the doctorate included, inside a college that also houses medical laboratory science and communication disorders rather than nursing on its own. That mix shows up in the master’s offerings beneath the doctorate, one of which trains nurse educators specifically for interprofessional teaching rather than for classroom nursing education in isolation. If you are still choosing between a master’s and the doctorate, the ladder here runs through family practice, nurse education and health systems leadership. It is a small doctoral program at a regional public campus. School-wide average graduate tuition here, which excludes DNP add-on charges, sits in the lowest fifth of the 306 accredited institutions that publish a rate, in the 2023-24 federal figures.
Rhode Island College runs its DNP as two distinct programs. The BSN-to-DNP is a dual nurse practitioner route, and its adult-gerontology acute care option prepares you to certify as both a clinical nurse specialist and a nurse practitioner, so it is two credentials out of one program rather than the usual one. That route is mostly online and can be taken full or part time, but it wants at least a year of acute care behind you first. The MSN-to-DNP leadership program is the separate track for nurses who already hold a master’s. One administrative limit is worth knowing before you start: no more than six credits taken at the college as a non-matriculated student will count toward the degree, so testing the water has a ceiling.
Ashland publishes credits, years and per-semester load together for every route, which is rare enough to be the reason to look at it. From a master’s the DNP is 37 to 41 credit hours across six to eight semesters, so a little over two years full time. From a bachelor’s it is 79 credit hours over twelve semesters, four years. The nurse educator track is longer still at 82 credits on that same four-year shape. Six to eight credits a semester is the constant across all of them, and that is the number to hold against your working week rather than the totals. Some courses carry required on-campus sessions, so this is not a route you finish entirely from home.
Walsh builds its graduate programs around people who are working, and it says how: evening and weekend classes, with many programs available online, the doctorate among them. Evening and weekend is a more specific promise than flexible, because it tells you which parts of your week the university expects to claim. The doctorate is filed federally as a distance program. Against a student body of a few thousand, Walsh’s doctoral output sits in the upper half of accredited institutions for its size, which is more than a private university this small usually manages.
Bellarmine asks for a 3.5 in any graduate coursework you have already done, against 3.0 for undergraduate work, a higher bar than most and the first thing to check if you have a master’s behind you. The nurse anesthesia track wants a year of recent full-time critical care employment, within the past two years, evidenced on a verification form rather than asserted. Then an interview with graduate faculty. The catalog is unusually blunt about what follows: enrollment in that track is limited, and meeting every minimum does not assure admission. Post-master’s applicants choose between advanced nursing practice and executive leadership, and delivery is online or hybrid depending on the route.
Mount Mercy sorts you by whether you already work as a nurse practitioner. If you do, the doctorate is 33 credits and about 12 months. If you hold a master’s in nursing without the practitioner credential, the family nurse practitioner route is 57 credits and about 24 months. Both run one class at a time in five and ten week blocks, which fits a nurse working full-time better than a conventional semester load does. Clinical work in the family practitioner sequence is one to one with a licensed preceptor, an advanced practice nurse, physician or physician assistant, rather than a group rotation. The nurse educator courses carry their own minimum of 100 clinical hours in a specialty you pick with faculty. It is a small university and the cohort matches.
PennWest runs its doctorate fully online at 27 credits, taken part-time across five semesters. The hour arithmetic is the part to read twice: the degree requires 1,000 clinical hours counted across your master’s and this program together, it accepts 500 transferred hours from master’s-level work, and it builds in a further 504 practicum hours. A nurse arriving with a full master’s practicum has a clear path through that, and one arriving short does not. You have to supply written documentation of the hours your master’s included at the point of application rather than later. A master’s in a related field such as business or health science can qualify you if you also hold a bachelor’s in nursing.
Colorado Springs sets a progression rule sharper than most: you must hold a B, which it defines as 84 percent, in every course to stay in the program. Not to graduate, to remain enrolled. One weak semester is a bigger problem here than at a school that checks only your average at the end. Bachelor’s entry runs a minimum of 70 graduate credits, and everything has to be finished within seven years of starting, generous enough for part-time study but not open-ended. The degree ends with a defended doctoral project rather than an exam. The program is filed federally as a distance program. School-wide average graduate tuition here, which excludes DNP add-on charges, sits in the middle third of the 306 accredited institutions that publish a rate, in the 2023-24 federal figures.
Northern Illinois calculates your grade point average on the last 60 hours of your bachelor’s rather than the whole degree, which is worth knowing if you started slowly and finished well. The threshold is 3.00. It also requires a current Illinois registered nurse license at the point of application, so this is not a program you enter from another state and sort out licensure later. The master’s-to-doctorate route runs 33 to 50 credits depending on what you bring. Its federal filing carries a distance-education flag, and as an Illinois public it prices residency the way public universities usually do. Its DNP output is small against the size of the university, so expect a compact cohort inside a large institution.
2 DNP tracks at this
institution, Nursing practice (general), Nursing practice (general). Ranked once, on the largest.
Radford puts a documented experience floor on its practitioner tracks: at least 2,000 hours, or one year of full-time clinical practice as a registered nurse, evidenced before clinical courses start. Documentation is the operative word there. This is not a preference in an admissions brochure, it is a condition you have to prove, and discovering that after you enroll is a worse position than settling it first. The doctorate is filed federally as a distance program. School-wide average graduate tuition here, which excludes DNP add-on charges, sits in the lowest third of the 306 accredited institutions that publish a rate, in the 2023-24 federal figures. Radford confers a small number of nursing doctorates a year, so the cohort is compact.
Alverno runs 33 to 40 credits depending on the track you choose and how much clinical work you owe, and a full-time student can finish in 18 months. The hour count is set against your master’s practicum rather than fixed, so it varies from student to student. The distinctive part is funding. Students in the educational leadership track may be eligible for $40,000 through the Wisconsin Nurse Educator Program, a state scheme aimed at the shortage of nursing faculty. That is a large share of the cost of a doctorate this length, and it attaches to a track rather than to merit, so the track you pick changes what you pay. Alverno is a small college in Milwaukee and the doctoral cohort is small.
South Dakota gives you a choice about how to serve the clinical hours rather than fixing a schedule: 240 hours can be done across a single summer or spread over two to three semesters. Compressing them into a summer is what makes this workable for a nurse who cannot take time out during the academic year, and few schools state that option so plainly. The doctorate is filed federally as a distance program. School-wide average graduate tuition here, which excludes DNP add-on charges, sits in the cheapest tenth of the 306 accredited institutions that publish a rate, in the 2023-24 federal figures. It is a small doctoral program, so expect a handful of people in your cohort.
Goshen runs its doctorate jointly with Eastern Mennonite University, and the arrangement is unusual: you take courses from faculty at both institutions but enroll at one, and the diploma and the billing follow whichever you pick. One program, two possible names on the certificate. The shape is 33 credit hours across 10 courses, either nine semesters or an accelerated six-semester route finishing in 22 months. Coursework is asynchronous with one required in-person residency. The clinical requirement is 1,000 post-baccalaureate supervised hours, and hours you logged during your master’s count toward it, which is what makes the accelerated option realistic rather than punishing. The doctoral work is an evidence-based practice project rather than a research dissertation.
Lee runs three doctoral tracks, a general one, a family nurse practitioner route and an executive leadership doctorate, all online with full-time and part-time plans. Two things set it apart from the usual online arrangement. The school helps arrange your practicum, leadership and scholarly project placements in your own geographic area rather than leaving you to find them, and finding them is the single most common thing that stalls an online doctorate. There is also a real on-campus component: annual intensive sessions, plus a three-day skills lab for practitioner students held before the first practicum, so you learn advanced assessment in person before using it on a patient. Admission wants a 3.0 cumulative average, and you may apply while still eligible for licensure rather than already licensed.
La Salle runs two DNP routes that ask for very different lives. The post-master’+A+’s track is aimed at nurses moving into organizational policy, quality improvement and executive roles, and can be fitted around work. The nurse anesthesia route is a 41-month integrated hybrid program of didactic and clinical work ending in a scholarly project, taught through the Frank J. Tornetta school, and 41 months of it is close to continuous. Both sit in Philadelphia, where eleven accredited institutions compete for clinical placements, so ask early how each one arranges yours. Post-MSN students choose their pace explicitly, six credits a semester full time or three part time, and the required clinical hours vary with what you arrive holding. The post-BSN anesthesia route is built differently again: 24 months of coursework, then a 29-month clinical residency on site at the Tornetta program.
2 DNP tracks at this
institution, Family nurse practitioner, Psychiatric-mental health NP. Ranked once, on the largest.
Incarnate Word offers two entries with very different flexibility. Bachelor’s entry is full-time only and leads to either family or psychiatric mental health practitioner work. Master’s entry runs full-time or part-time and is scoped to advanced practice registered nurses and to nurses holding a clinically focused master’s, so a management or education master’s is not the intended input here. Full-time only on the bachelor’s route is the constraint that settles it for most working nurses, and the school states it plainly rather than burying it. Neither track carries a distance flag in the federal filing, so plan on San Antonio.
Hilo runs its bachelor’s entry across eight semesters and three years, summers included, so there is no quiet term in it. The master’s entry is five semesters over two years, admitting once a year in the fall with a priority deadline of 1 December. The licensing condition is the one to check first, and it is doubled: you need a current registered nurse license in Hawaii and in whatever state your clinical practice or project actually happens. Clinical hours are done in person on any Hawaiian island, provided you and the school can establish a site and a preceptor there, which is a real constraint on an island chain. Admission includes an interview with graduate faculty and three letters.
2 DNP tracks at this
institution, Family nurse practitioner, Geriatric. Ranked once, on the largest.
Portland decouples clinical hours from coursework and says why: the hours are designed for broad exposure across the lifespan and do not have to be paired with a specific management course, which makes placements easier to arrange. If you have ever lost a term waiting for the right rotation to line up with the right class, that is the constraint being removed. There is also a palliative care focus, and the school is precise about what it demands. Sitting the Advanced Certified Hospice and Palliative Nurse exam requires 500 palliative care clinical hours completed within the previous 12 months, so when you do those hours matters as much as how many. Neither track carries a distance flag federally.
West Virginia’s nurse anesthesia doctorate runs a tight application window: it opens 1 August and closes 1 November for the cohort starting the following fall. Miss it and you wait a full year. The experience floor is one year of post-orientation critical care, though the school says it prefers two to three years of current full-time work, so meeting the minimum is not the same as being competitive. Grade point average wants 3.0 in nursing and 3.0 overall, with provisional admission possible between 2.75 and 2.99 depending on space. You also need current basic and advanced cardiac life support certification, plus pediatric advanced life support before clinical activities begin. Those are three separate courses to schedule.
Baptist Health Sciences runs one cohort a year and it starts in January, for the BSN and the MSN entry points alike. Applications are accepted on a rolling basis but the priority deadline is 1 October, so the real calendar is tighter than rolling admission suggests. Miss the intake and you wait a year. The adult-gerontology acute care concentration is 66 credit hours, and the university puts completion at three years if you want it done that way. The post-MSN pathway is scoped to a specific purpose rather than being a general doctorate: it exists to add a second APRN credential, which is a narrower and more useful thing if you already practice and want a different patient population.
2 DNP tracks at this
institution, Family nurse practitioner, Nursing practice (general). Ranked once, on the largest.
Concordia publishes both totals for both routes, which makes them easy to weigh against each other. Bachelor’s entry is 70 credit hours and 1,008 clinical and practicum hours over three to four years, online with a mandatory four-day on-campus residency. The psychiatric mental health route from a master’s runs eight semesters, about three years, and requires 1,000 post-baccalaureate residency hours of which 500 must be psychiatric hours completed inside the program. That 500-hour floor is the number to check against what you already hold. Two eligibility limits come first: the online program is not open to international students or anyone needing an F1 visa, and state approval for online licensure varies, so check yours against the school’s disclosure list before you apply.
Francis Marion aims its doctorate at rural practice, which is the honest description of where its graduates work in South Carolina. Three tracks run: a master’s entry for nurses who already hold an advanced practice license, and two bachelor’s entries leading to family or psychiatric mental health practice. The constraint to plan around is the calendar, because both entries admit for fall only. Miss it and you wait a year, so the application timeline matters more here than at a school with rolling or multi-term intakes. Master’s entry wants a cumulative 3.0 in the master’s. School-wide average graduate tuition here, which excludes DNP add-on charges, sits in the lowest third of the 306 accredited institutions that publish a rate, in the 2023-24 federal figures. Post-master’s certificates in psychiatric mental health and nurse education run alongside for nurses who want a credential without the degree.
4 DNP tracks at this
institution, Adult health, Critical care, Psychiatric-mental health NP, Registered nursing (general). Ranked once, on the largest.
NYU gives you seven years from the date you matriculate to finish, whichever entry option you take, holding a 3.0 grade point average throughout. Seven years is generous by the standards of this field, and it is the number that matters most if you expect your working life to be unpredictable. The advanced standing route is a minimum of 36 credits, and 400 of its clinical hours are attached specifically to the DNP project rather than to general practice. That is a large share of your hours riding on the project, which is worth knowing because project hours depend on finding a site and a question, and those are the parts that stall.
McNeese designed its DNP around nurses who are still working: part-time only, post-master’s only, and delivered face to face with an online component rather than as a fully remote program. It is 54 semester credit hours beyond a master’s in nursing, which is at the heavier end for a post-master’s route where 33 to 40 is common, so the trade for the part-time pace is a longer total commitment. School-wide average graduate tuition here, which excludes DNP add-on charges, sits in the cheapest tenth of the 306 accredited institutions that publish a rate, in the 2023-24 federal figures, and the out-of-state rate is barely higher, which is unusual for a public university.
Akron runs a nurse anesthesia track accredited separately by the Council on Accreditation of Nurse Anesthesia Educational Programs, alongside the Commission on Collegiate Nursing Education accreditation covering the bachelor’s, master’s, doctorate and post-graduate advanced practice certificate. Two accreditors on one program is what a specialized anesthesia track requires, and it is worth confirming at any school offering one. Clinical rotations run through Northeast Ohio health systems, so placements are local and the network is established. The doctoral program itself is small, conferring a handful of degrees a year, which means close faculty contact and a cohort you will know by name. School-wide average graduate tuition here, which excludes DNP add-on charges, sits in the lowest fifth of the 306 accredited institutions that publish a rate, in the 2023-24 federal figures.
Ursuline sets your DNP residency hours per student rather than per program. The college states that the clinical hours required will be determined from your previous education and experience together with the requirements of the specialty you pick, so two people admitted the same year can owe materially different amounts. That is worth settling in writing before you enroll, because it is the variable that decides how long the degree actually takes you. It is a small private college of under a thousand students near Cleveland, its federal filing flags the program for distance study, and it confers a small number of doctorates a year, so expect a compact cohort rather than a large one.
2 DNP tracks at this
institution, Family nurse practitioner, Nursing practice (general). Ranked once, on the largest.
Loyola runs five routes and splits them cleanly by delivery: family practice and the executive leadership doctorate are online, while acute care, nurse anesthesia and the dual acute care plus anesthesia option are hybrid. The anesthesia program is 87 credits with practicums stacking at a minimum of 200, then 400, then 400 hours, and its semesters run continuously, with holidays and time off scheduled individually rather than falling on a shared calendar. That is a demanding structure, and the school describes it plainly instead of burying it. The executive route needs 30 or more credits and uses a personal transcript evaluation to credit the supervised practicum hours your master’s already covered, which can cut the coursework down. A dual anesthesia and acute care credential is rare.
2 DNP tracks at this
institution, Family nurse practitioner, Psychiatric-mental health NP. Ranked once, on the largest.
Binghamton runs two routes, and the advanced standing one carries a condition most schools do not impose: you must already hold national certification as a nurse practitioner or clinical nurse specialist, in one of the four clinical areas Decker itself offers, which are family, community health, adult-gerontology primary care and family psychiatric mental health. Certification in a specialty the college does not teach will not get you in. Both routes want an unencumbered New York registered nurse license, and the bachelor’s route needs it by the time you matriculate rather than at application. The grade point average floor is 3.0 on both. Bachelor’s entry aims at nurses heading for expert clinical practice rather than administration.
South College runs two DNPs on very different clocks. The nurse anesthesia concentration is a fixed full-time plan, 36 months across 12 quarters, with no part-time option in the published curriculum. The post-master’s DNP is the opposite: online, and paced by how fast you demonstrate mastery rather than by a semester calendar, with average completion falling between 18 and 30 months and the quickest full-time route at 21. That is a twelve-month spread between two students taking the same degree. So the honest planning question here is not how long the program takes, it is how many hours a week you can genuinely put into it.
Florida Southern runs its doctorate as a leadership degree rather than a clinical one, and says so plainly: healthcare policy and advocacy, finance, information systems, project management and organizational leadership. If you want a new patient population, this is not the program. If you want to run something, the coursework aims squarely at that. Everything is online, and the college charges out-of-state students the same rate as everyone else, which removes the residency penalty that shapes the arithmetic at most public universities. Project and practicum work is done against real problems inside healthcare organizations rather than as an academic exercise. It is a post-master’s program, so the clinical core is assumed to be behind you.
2 DNP tracks at this
institution, Family nurse practitioner, Nursing practice (general). Ranked once, on the largest.
Holy Family runs its post-master’s doctorate online for advanced practice registered nurses, and takes you part-time or full-time, so the pace is yours rather than a cohort’s. The admission conditions are specific and worth reading before you pay an application fee. Your BSN or MSN has to come from a program accredited by CCNE, ACEN or CNEA, the undergraduate grade point average floor is 3.0, and the application asks for a statement of goals naming the scholarly project you intend to pursue. That last one is unusual at application stage, because most schools let you settle the project after you enroll. Holy Family also files a family nurse practitioner track beside the general doctorate. It is a private university of about 3,200 students, and the doctoral cohort is small to match.
Briar Cliff scopes its doctorate to nurses who are already certified practitioners and puts it at two years, online. This is a top-up rather than a route into practice, and the coursework says so: population health, informatics, financial management and ethics rather than another clinical population. The money side is where Briar Cliff does something different. It discounts tuition for employees of partner organizations on a sliding scale set by how many colleagues enroll alongside you, and takes 20 percent off online graduate tuition for active duty military. If your employer is on that partner list, ask before you apply anywhere else. Briar Cliff is small, and the doctoral cohort is small.
Mary Baldwin’s post-MSN DNP attaches 400 project hours to the clinical hours you already earned during your master’s, and together they have to reach the 1,000 the degree requires. So the size of what is left is set by what your MSN carried rather than by a fixed number here. The catalog also does something almost no school does: it estimates study time at two to three hours for every credit hour, which turns an abstract course load into a countable number of evenings. Virginia residents taking at least 12 credit hours can claim the state’s tuition assistance grant, worth $5,000 in the year the university publishes, and that is money which does not depend on the university itself.
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.
Seton Hall prices the two entries far apart and publishes both: 31 credits and up if you already hold a master’s in nursing, against 73 to 79 credits coming from a bachelor’s. That is more than double, and it is the clearest argument on this card for finishing a master’s first if you are weighing the two. The program runs online. The wording Seton Hall uses is worth noticing as well, because it names master’s holders in direct or indirect care, so a master’s that was not a clinical practitioner degree is explicitly in scope here rather than left ambiguous.
4 DNP tracks at this
institution, Clinical Nurse Specialist, Family nurse practitioner, Nursing practice (general), Psychiatric-mental health NP. Ranked once, on the largest.
TCU runs something most nursing schools do not: a bridge from the practice doctorate to a research PhD, for nurses who already hold a DNP and want to move from implementing evidence to producing it. That route wants a 3.5 grade point average, with provisional admission considered at 3.0. It matters if you think you might eventually teach or lead research, because it means you are not choosing between the two doctorates permanently when you pick this one. The psychiatric mental health route from a bachelor’s takes three years and asks for a single year of nursing experience, which is a low floor for a psychiatric track and makes it reachable earlier in a career than most.
Madonna runs two routes that barely resemble each other. The post-BSN doctorate is 74 credit hours with an MSN exit built into it, meaning you can leave with a master’s if the doctorate stops making sense partway through, which is a genuine safety net rather than a marketing line. For nurses who already hold an MSN the program is 33 semester hours taken entirely online. It charges one published rate whichever state you live in, so residency does not move the price the way it would at a public university, and its federal filing does carry a distance-education flag. Expect a small cohort: this is a private university of about 2,100 students.
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.
4 DNP tracks at this
institution, Family nurse practitioner, Geriatric, Nursing practice (general), Psychiatric-mental health NP. Ranked once, on the largest.
Seattle University files five separate DNP specialties, nurse midwifery among them, which few schools run at all. The midwifery program publishes both of its clocks: three years and 67 to 69 credits if you arrive as a registered nurse, four years and 110 to 112 credits through the immersion route built for people entering nursing from another field entirely. That second number is the honest price of a career change, and publishing it beats quoting a range. None of the tracks carries a distance flag in the federal filing, so this is a campus program in Seattle rather than an online one. By doctoral output it sits in the top tenth of accredited institutions.
King sets a higher bar for the shorter route, which is the opposite of what most people expect. Master’s entry wants a grade point average of 3.25 across your bachelor’s and master’s. Bachelor’s entry wants 3.0. So if your master’s grades were middling, the longer route may be the one actually open to you. The program runs online at 36 semester hours over six semesters, and you may take it slower if you need to. The clinical requirement is 1,000 documented post-baccalaureate hours, with documented doing real work in that sentence. Both entries want a nursing degree from an accredited program, the Commission on Collegiate Nursing Education among the bodies named. King is small, so the cohorts are small.
2 DNP tracks at this
institution, Family nurse practitioner, Registered nursing (general). Ranked once, on the largest.
Pace runs a 30-credit post-master’s doctorate over two years part-time, entirely online, and sets a higher admission bar than most: a 3.3 grade point average in your master’s, or equivalent professional experience where your grades fall short. That second clause is worth asking about directly, because schools rarely put a route around a GPA floor in writing. The practitioner routes, adult-gerontology acute care, family, and psychiatric mental health, all land at 1,000 supervised practice hours whichever one you take. Anyone coming through the bridge route meets the program director for a gap analysis first, so what you owe is settled before you enroll rather than after. Two years part-time is a realistic clock for a nurse who is not stepping away from work.
Louisiana at Lafayette charges no out-of-state premium on its online doctorate, which removes the penalty that usually makes a public university expensive from elsewhere. The program runs online with a dedicated enrollment specialist, round-the-clock tutoring and an online student resource center. One thing the university’s own reporting makes plain is worth knowing first: most students in the cohort are nurse practitioners, and a student who arrived from an administration and teaching background needed additional residency hours to finish. If your master’s was not a clinical practitioner degree, ask what your hour total will be rather than assuming the published one covers you. School-wide average graduate tuition here, which excludes DNP add-on charges, sits in the cheapest tenth of the 306 accredited institutions that publish a rate, in the 2023-24 federal figures, and the out-of-state rate is about 3.5 times the in-state one, so residency matters a great deal.
St. Thomas keeps its online DNP compact and regular: 13 core courses totaling 39 credits, with the residency built as three sequential practicum courses rather than one open-ended requirement. Each runs seven weeks and carries three credits, and together they are where the program’s required hours get completed. Nine of the 39 credits sit in that practicum sequence, so close to a quarter of the degree is residency rather than coursework. The seven-week course length is the part worth planning around, because it sets a rhythm you can hold a work roster against, and a stumble in one course costs you weeks rather than a whole semester.
West Virginia Wesleyan carries Commission on Collegiate Nursing Education accreditation across the whole ladder, the bachelor’s, the master’s, the post-graduate advanced practice certificate and the doctorate, and its bachelor’s program is separately approved by the West Virginia Board of Examiners for Registered Nurses. A private college that accredits every rung rather than only the top one is unusual at this size. The doctorate is filed federally as a distance program and confers very few degrees a year, so expect a handful of people in your cohort and faculty who know all of them. The college also publishes aggregated student achievement outcomes by graduating class.
4 DNP tracks at this
institution, Critical care, Family nurse practitioner, Nursing practice (general), Psychiatric-mental health NP. Ranked once, on the largest.
Allen College publishes a credit total for every route, which makes the choice unusually easy to price. The registered nurse to doctorate route is 76 credits and carries four practitioner tracks: family, psychiatric mental health, adult-gerontology acute care and acute care pediatrics. Leadership in health care delivery and administration is 62 credits. The post-master’s systems leadership route is 33. That spread, from 33 to 76, is what your prior education is worth here in plain numbers. Bachelor’s entry starts twice a year, in fall and spring, and full-time and part-time options run with online delivery. The Commission on Collegiate Nursing Education accredits the bachelor’s, master’s, doctorate and post-graduate advanced practice certificate.
Le Moyne publishes the clinical figure most schools bury: 810 hours of practice embedded into the bachelor’s entry program of study rather than arranged separately alongside it. That route runs either four years full-time or five years part-time. The post-master’s pathway is 29 credits over two years and is scoped to nurses who already hold family practitioner certification. What decides whether this fits a working nurse is the campus pattern: family practitioner coursework meets on campus once a week, on Mondays, and more on-campus meetings get added as you approach the doctoral project. One fixed weekday is easier to plan around than scattered intensives, but it is every week rather than a few times a year.
Franklin publishes what it will take off your plate, which is rarer than it should be and worth checking before you apply anywhere else. An eligible master’s holder can transfer up to 500 practicum hours and up to 12 credit hours of coursework, and practicum hours sit inside the courses rather than being arranged separately, which is how the leadership track lands at about two years. The practitioner tracks run longer: roughly three years for family, psychiatric mental health and adult-gerontology primary care if you already hold a master’s, and three to four years coming from a bachelor’s. All of it is online. Franklin confers a small number of nursing doctorates a year, so this is a route built around transfer credit and pace rather than a large cohort.
West Coast runs its DNP entirely online and puts the fastest route at 20 months, which is at the short end of anything published by a school on this site. It also advertises no waitlist, and that matters more than it sounds. A lot of programs admit once a year into a fixed cohort, so a place can still be twelve months away after you have been accepted. The curriculum is built around strategic leadership and project management rather than around a clinical specialty, with the final four credits varying by the specialty you enroll in. It is a for-profit institution and its Texas campus confers a small number of doctorates a year, so this is a compact program rather than a large one, whatever the flexible format suggests about scale.
3 DNP tracks at this
institution, Geriatric, Nursing administration, Nursing practice (general). Ranked once, on the largest.
This is a graduate health professions school rather than a university with a nursing college inside it, and the doctorate is built for people already running something. The curriculum is modeled on executive MBA programs, which here means online coursework broken up by in-person intensives rather than a fully remote degree. You pick the pace at admission: four semesters or five, with two part-time options beside them, and the choice is framed around what your job will tolerate. Everyone on this campus is in a health profession, so the people in your cohort are clinicians rather than general graduate students. Against an enrollment of about 1,700 it confers nursing doctorates at one of the higher rates in the country, which is what a specialist campus looks like in the federal data.
Felician runs its doctorate as a nursing education track and nothing else, taught online, scoped to nurses who already hold a master’s. The target is faculty work, academic practice and workforce development rather than advanced clinical practice, so this is the degree you take to teach rather than to add a patient population. Read the narrowness as a signal: a school with one education-focused track is staffing for that, not splitting its attention across six clinical specialties. Felician is a small private university in New Jersey and the doctoral cohort is small to match.
5 DNP tracks at this
institution, Clinical Nurse Specialist, Family nurse practitioner, Geriatric, Nursing administration, Nursing practice (general). Ranked once, on the largest.
Southern Indiana publishes three separate credit totals and the gap between them is most of the decision. The post-master’s advanced nursing practice route is 35 credits in the specialty. The BSN-to-DNP family nurse practitioner route is 72. Organizational and systems leadership, also from a BSN, is 70 with 1,000 practice hours attached. What makes the post-master’s route worth a close look is the transfer policy: the college accepts up to 42 credit hours from your MSN, which is more generous than most and is why that first number is as low as it is. Coursework is online with synchronous intensives twice a year, so there are fixed dates in the diary rather than an open-ended commitment.
2 DNP tracks at this
institution, Nursing administration, Psychiatric-mental health NP. Ranked once, on the largest.
Toledo splits its DNP by how much of it you can do from home. The nurse executive and nurse leadership pathways are delivered entirely online. The nurse practitioner tracks are not: they combine online coursework with required in-person clinical experiences and on-campus skills immersion days the college strongly recommends rather than mandates, so the honest planning assumption is that you will be traveling. Nurse anesthesia is a different scale again at 97 credits. One admission rule catches people out: coursework more than seven years old at the point you apply will not count, so a master’s you finished a decade ago may not carry across the way you expect.
Marian sizes its two main tracks very differently, and that gap is most of the decision. The family nurse practitioner program is 71 credit hours across eight semesters full time. Nurse anesthesia is 87 credit hours and about 36 months. Sixteen credits and a different calendar separate them, so choosing a specialty here changes the length of your commitment as much as its content. Both are full-time shapes rather than something to run alongside a roster. It is a private university in Indianapolis, so it publishes one rate whatever state you live in, and it confers a small number of doctorates a year, which points to small cohorts in both tracks.
2 DNP tracks at this
institution, Family nurse practitioner, Nursing practice (general). Ranked once, on the largest.
Texas Wesleyan frames its DNP around what the degree does to a career rather than what it adds to a transcript: staying close to direct patient care, moving gradually into leadership, or combining clinical work with teaching, policy and quality improvement. The college is candid that the executive endpoint is about shaping an organization rather than running a single unit, and that what it pays varies widely by health system size and region rather than by the credential. Six doctorates a year from a private university of 2,487 in Fort Worth makes this a small program by design. Up to 500 practice hours from a qualifying master’s can be transferred toward the 1,000 the degree requires.
D’Youville builds your plan of study after reading your transcripts and your documented clinical hours, so what you owe is worked out individually rather than published as a single number. The family practitioner route runs six consecutive semesters and can be finished in as little as two years, full-time or part-time, and you can start in either fall or spring. There is also a psychiatric mental health plan of study written for nurses already practicing as advanced practice registered nurses who want to move into mental health leadership. One detail reflects where the university sits: it publishes commuter arrangements for part-time Canadian students, which matters in Buffalo and almost nowhere else.
Scranton runs a 30-credit post-master’+A+’s leadership DNP at $772 per credit, which is one of the few programs on this site to publish a per-credit rate rather than an annual figure, and it makes the arithmetic straightforward. The format is executive: online coursework built on the assumption that you are practicing full-time while you study, which is a design choice rather than a concession. All students complete a minimum of 1,000 clinical hours toward the capstone, and advanced practice students are credited for hours already completed in a master’+A+’s specialty. The framing is Jesuit, with the emphasis on ethical leadership and service alongside the clinical content.
Bellin decides your credit load with a gap analysis rather than a fixed number. The floor is 27 credits and more can be added depending on what that analysis finds, so two students admitted in the same term can owe different amounts. Certified advanced practice nurses can usually carry at least 500 hours across from their master’s. Delivery splits by route: bachelor’s entry is hybrid, master’s entry is online, and anyone taking the post-graduate certificate option to add the advanced practice component has to attend classes in person. That last condition is the one that decides whether this fits around a job. Bellin is a nursing college of under a thousand students, so the cohort is small and everyone in it is doing the same thing.
Millikin runs a nurse anesthesia doctorate as 36 months of full-time study, which is the standard shape for that credential and not something you fit around a job. Transfer credit is capped tightly: up to 9 credit hours from another graduate program, so arriving with a partial master’s saves you three courses at most. The school also runs a master’s entry route for people holding a bachelor’s in something other than nursing, which is a genuine career change rather than an advancement path. For a university of about 1,600 students, its doctoral output against size sits in the top eighth nationally, which is what happens when a small campus commits to one profession.
Adelphi files its doctorate under a geriatric specialty rather than a general one, which is unusual and tells you where the program points: care of older adults rather than a broad advanced practice degree. The college puts the graduate timeline at roughly three years. It also runs the undergraduate route beneath it, and that matters in New York, because state law requires a registered nurse to earn a bachelor’s in nursing within ten years of licensure, so a nurse working through that requirement can do both in one place. The doctorate carries no distance flag in its federal filing, so plan on being on Long Island. It is a small doctoral program inside a mid-sized private university.
Saint Benedict’s doctorate is new. The program launched in 2021 and produced its first graduate in 2023, so you would be joining something still finding its shape rather than a long-settled sequence. There are two tracks, leadership and family nurse practitioner, and the first cohort split heavily toward the practitioner side. Clinical rotations in that first group were placed with working hospital executives and directors of advanced practice, which is the sort of access a small program can arrange and a large one often cannot. The college confers very few nursing doctorates a year. The program is filed federally as a distance program.
Catholic University runs a joint doctorate and business master’s on overlapping credits, which is a different proposition from taking the two separately. The point of it is executive work in health systems, where you need the clinical grounding and the finance and operations side together. It runs fully online with optional in-person experiences. Admission to that route wants a bachelor’s and a master’s in nursing, a cumulative 3.2, and documented completion of 500 or more post-baccalaureate clinical hours, though the school will consider exceptions case by case. Documented is the word to plan around, because assembling that record takes longer than people expect. A straight doctorate runs from either a bachelor’s or a master’s for anyone who does not want the business half.
Boston runs both entries, one from a bachelor’s in nursing and one from a master’s for advanced practice nurses already in the field, and points the degree at systems rather than at a new patient population: health systems leadership, policy development and interdisciplinary work. A post-master’s certificate in psychiatric mental health runs alongside for nurses who want that credential without committing to a doctorate. This is a small doctoral program. It confers only a couple of nursing doctorates a year, which cuts both ways: a cohort of a handful and faculty attention a larger program cannot match, against fewer people to compare notes with.
2 DNP tracks at this
institution, Family nurse practitioner, Nursing practice (general). Ranked once, on the largest.
Rocky Mountain runs its post-master’s doctorate in 20 months across five semesters, entirely online, and the design assumption is stated rather than implied: the program expects you to keep working as a nurse or practitioner throughout, so that what you learn goes into your own practice while you are learning it. Twenty months is short for a doctorate and only works because the clinical core is already behind you. Beside it sits a longer route from a bachelor’s that leads to family practitioner preparation, running nine semesters on a limited-residency model, so most of it is remote with some scheduled time in person.
Tampa’s doctorate is one of the smallest on this site, conferring about one degree a year against an enrollment above eleven thousand, so this is a program running at the edge of viability rather than an established pipeline. That cuts both ways: individual attention is close to guaranteed, and a cohort barely exists. The program is filed federally as a distance program. One practical detail the university publishes is that doctoral students are not assessed the student service fee charged on summer sessions, a small saving but a real one if you study year-round.
Saint Francis runs a 32-credit post-master’s doctorate online, taught in eight-week cycles with a new cohort starting every fall. Eight-week blocks mean fewer courses at once and each one finished faster, which is the structural reason this fits around a roster. The core carries two residency courses rather than one, so the doctoral work is split across terms instead of landing all at the end. An optional education concentration exists for people who intend to teach, and it adds a four-credit nursing education practicum. Admission wants a master’s in nursing and a 3.0 grade point average. The Commission on Collegiate Nursing Education accredits the college’s programs.
Chaminade’s doctorate is new and built around Hawaii. The program runs online from a bachelor’s through a master’s to the doctorate, with a stated focus on the populations of the islands, and it carries a mandatory on-campus fall immersion, so fully remote it is not. The tracks split by what you want to become: practitioner routes for nurses holding a bachelor’s, and an executive leader track a master’s-prepared nurse can enter directly. One condition catches people out and the college states it plainly. Clinical placement partners require full vaccination including boosters before you begin clinical courses, and there is no route through the program without it. Applications for a fall start open around 15 October.
Lourdes builds its 37-credit DNP out of four named parts rather than one course list: online asynchronous coursework, experiential learning, the DNP project, and a competency validation stage. That last one is the unusual piece. Most programs treat the project as the terminal hurdle, whereas here there is a separate demonstration that you can do the thing before you finish. It is a small private university of under a thousand students in northwest Ohio conferring a handful of doctorates a year, so the cohort is small and the asynchronous format is what makes the reach wider than the campus. Its federal filing carries no distance-education flag for the degree.
Regis publishes the arithmetic that decides how long this takes, and it is unusually candid about it. You need 1,000 hours after the bachelor’s. A nurse arriving with a practitioner master’s typically enters with 600 of them already banked. A nurse arriving with a leadership, management or education master’s typically enters with 100 to 200. That is a gap of several hundred hours between two people who both hold a master’s, and it is the biggest single variable in what this degree costs you in time. Coursework runs 28 to 33 credits. The neonatal practitioner option adds a hard condition: two years of experience in a level III neonatal intensive care unit before you start.
Northern Michigan publishes both tracks and both application cycles, which is more forward planning than most schools give you. The post-baccalaureate curriculum is 72 credit hours and the post-master’s is 33, so the master’s you already hold is worth 39 credits here. The two cohorts run on different clocks: the post-master’s intake closes in mid-October, while the post-baccalaureate cohort starts the following August against an April deadline. Entering from a bachelor’s therefore means a longer wait before you even begin, not just a longer program once you do. The university also warns that admissions may close earlier than the published date if the seats fill, so treat that deadline as a ceiling rather than a target.
North Park runs its doctorate as a post-graduate program for nurses who already hold a master’s, and it is a light one: 33 credits across 12 courses, a minimum of 350 practicum hours, and five semesters end to end. The courses are online and written around people who are still working, so the practicum is the part that has to fit around a job rather than the coursework. Thirty-three credits is at the low end for a nursing doctorate, which is what a post-graduate route looks like once a master’s has covered the clinical core. This is a small private university in Chicago conferring only a handful of nursing doctorates a year, so expect a cohort you can count rather than a program with several tracks running at once.
St Thomas has the smallest doctoral output of any institution on this site, conferring about one degree a year, so treat this as a program to ask direct questions about rather than one with an established cohort behind it. The graduate ladder beneath it is more developed: a master’s with four concentrations, and a post-master’s psychiatric mental health certificate for advanced practice nurses that leads to eligibility for national certification in that specialty. The doctorate carries no distance flag in its federal filing, so plan on Houston. The university says it has taught nursing in the city for more than a century.
DeSales offers its post-master’+A+’s DNP full or part-time with two concentrations, clinical leadership and executive leadership, so the choice is between deepening practice and moving away from it. The detail worth planning around is financial rather than academic: acute care nurse practitioner students have access to partner loan repayment of up to $65,000 for a three-year commitment, which changes the arithmetic considerably for anyone willing to sign one. Admission runs on cohort deposits with fixed deadlines, so a place is held by paying rather than by accepting. DeSales gates each track on prior experience rather than on one blanket requirement. The family route wants 24 months caring for adults, the adult-gerontology acute care route 24 months of adult acute or ICU work, and the psychiatric route 24 months in mental health, all before you enter the clinical sequence.
A T Still points its doctorate at systems rather than patients, and offers three concentrations to aim it: organizational leadership, nurse educator, and population health. If you want a new clinical population this is the wrong program, and the university is clear about that rather than leaving you to infer it. Teaching is web-based and built around directed readings and discussion with faculty and working healthcare leaders, ending in a scholarly project applied to a real organization. The program holds accreditation from the Commission on Collegiate Nursing Education. It sits inside a college of graduate health studies, so the doctorate is one of several health professions taught at a distance here.
Saginaw Valley runs its master’s-to-doctorate route entirely online, and it points at two jobs rather than at clinical practice: nurse educator and nurse administrator, plus a dual track that gives you both. If you want to add a patient population, this is not the program. If you want to run a unit or teach, the dual track is the interesting one, because doing both inside one sequence is rare. Coursework is primarily online with occasional evening classes, so online here carries a small live commitment worth checking against your roster. This is a small doctoral program inside a mid-sized public university, so expect a handful of people rather than a cohort.
Saint Francis says on its own program page that the doctorate is not currently accepting new students, and points prospective applicants at its master’s practitioner program instead. That is the first thing to confirm with the school before spending time on an application here. When it runs, the program is hybrid, takes full-time or part-time students, and its length varies rather than being fixed. The accreditation history is worth knowing as well: the Commission on Collegiate Nursing Education granted the doctorate a five-year term in 2019 while giving the bachelor’s the full ten, so the two sit on different cycles.
2 DNP tracks at this
institution, Family nurse practitioner, Nursing practice (general). Ranked once, on the largest.
Simmons publishes its clinical hours per component rather than as one total, which makes the executive leadership route unusually easy to plan against. The doctoral portion carries 252 clinical hours, 29 credit hours and at least 181 hours on the DNP project itself. Come in from a BSN and the master’s leadership stage adds 567 clinical hours and 35 credits ahead of all that. The format is blended, online coursework with in-person elements, rather than either extreme. If you did your master’s at Simmons the route is materially easier to start: a streamlined application, the application fee waived, and up to five credits waived from the standard thirty once you are accepted.
Widener settles your clinical hours by audit rather than by rule. Every post-MSN applicant gets a gap analysis, in which the hours you completed toward your master’s are applied against the 1,000 the doctorate requires, and if that leaves you short you make up the difference inside the DNP project courses. Health systems leadership works the same way, with the shortfall covered by two specialization courses carrying roughly 150 to 167 hours between them. So two people admitted in the same year can owe very different amounts of clinical time, and you will not know which you are until the analysis is done. The GRE is not required.
Eastern Michigan separates its two kinds of clinical hours instead of quoting one total, and the distinction matters. Both concentrations carry a minimum of 750 direct patient care hours plus 500 doctoral practicum hours, so patient-facing work and project work are counted apart rather than blurred together. The adult-gerontology primary care concentration is 75 credit hours and the family route is 78, and both prepare you for national certification. Delivery is hybrid. Adult-gerontology graduates work in physician practices, community health centers, outpatient clinics, urgent care and long-term care, while the family route covers infancy through older adulthood, which is the wider scope and the longer program by three credits.
Brenau runs two doctorates side by side, one for advanced practice nurses and one for leadership and management, both scoped to people who already hold a master’s in nursing. The structure is published semester by semester: the leadership route runs six semesters, the advanced practice route seven. What both share is how the project is handled, as a four-course sequence covering identification, development, implementation, and outcomes evaluation with dissemination, each carrying one-to-one faculty mentorship. Splitting the project across four graded courses rather than leaving it as a capstone means the work gets paced for you instead of piling up at the end. The Commission on Collegiate Nursing Education granted the school’s bachelor’s, master’s and post-master’s acute care certificate a full ten-year accreditation running to September 2030.
5 DNP tracks at this
institution, Critical care, Family nurse practitioner, Nursing practice (general), Pediatric, Psychiatric-mental health NP. Ranked once, on the largest.
Oregon Health and Science runs a dual-degree route for people coming from outside nursing entirely: a bachelor’s in a non-nursing field plus prerequisites gets you 15 months to the BS, and then three years for the doctorate. That is a genuine career-change path rather than an advancement one, and few schools publish the whole span. Coursework is online with some in-person requirements. It also files seven separate DNP records federally, more than all but one institution in this dataset, and it confers doctorates at one of the highest rates in the country measured against its enrollment, which is what a specialist health sciences campus looks like in the data.
Western University does something for career-changers that almost no practitioner program does: an applicant without a full year of registered nurse experience still qualifies. You are placed on a modified curriculum and must complete 1,800 hours of RN employment by the end of the first year instead of before you start. For a nurse who wants to keep moving rather than wait out a year at the bedside, that is the whole decision. The prerequisite that catches people is smaller and stricter: a statistics course of at least two semester units passed at C or better, taken at a regionally accredited institution in the United States.
Two figures the federal survey publishes are deliberately not
scored. Undergraduate admission rate would rank a doctorate on who
the institution admits to a bachelor's degree seven years earlier,
and institution size is not a measure of anything a student
receives.
Conferral volume saturates at 25 a year. Above that a program
scores full marks and gains nothing further for being larger. An
earlier version of this model did not saturate it, and the result
ranked the highest-volume distance provider in the country first, arithmetically correct and editorially worthless.
Which Route Fits You
The ranking above sorts schools. It cannot tell you which of the three
doors you are standing at, and that decision changes the length of
the degree by years more than the choice of institution does. Each
route has its own ranked list of the schools that confirm it.
The route that takes you from a bachelor's straight to the doctorate without stopping at a master's. It is the longest single commitment of the three, and for the right person it is also the most efficient.
Typical length: Three to four years full-time; longer part-time
The shortest route to the doctorate, for nurses who already hold a master's. Most of the people on it are working full-time and studying around shifts, and the programs are built assuming exactly that.
Typical length: One to two years full-time; commonly longer part-time
Structurally close to the MSN-to-DNP route, and named differently because programs use the term for a specific admissions category rather than a different curriculum. The distinction that matters is how prior hours and prior coursework are treated.
Typical length: One to two years, frequently part-time
How To Choose A DNP Program
The ranking sorts on three published figures. These are the levers it
cannot see, ordered by how much they move the total cost of the
degree rather than by how often they get written about.
Start with the route, not the school
Entering with a bachelor’s rather than a master’s changes the degree by years and by most of its cost, and it is settled before any institution is compared. The three routes are set out in Which route fits you above.
Ask who secures your clinical placement
Programs fall into three groups and rarely say which on the program page: the school places you, the school helps and you finish the search, or you find every preceptor yourself. Against 1,000 supervised hours this is the largest cost nobody prints, and it is the thing most likely to decide whether you finish on schedule. The answer is usually in the student handbook rather than the brochure.
Ask what happens if the doctoral project overruns
Some programs bill continuation credits, or a candidacy fee, for each additional term a project runs. It appears in no published tuition schedule, it is charged exactly when a student is least able to absorb it, and it can exceed the gap between two schools in the ranking above.
Check residency before assuming the in-state rate
Across the 158 public institutions here that publish both figures, the median out-of-state rate is 2.2 times the in-state one. Studying at a distance does not by itself make you a resident of the state setting the lower figure.
Read the rate, not a total
The tuition figure is an annual institutional rate. Most DNP students study part-time and most programs bill by the credit, so multiplying a yearly figure by a program length produces a confident number that is wrong. No page on this site does it.
Confirm the specialty exists before you weigh the school
A university with a strong general doctorate may not run the population focus you want, and a track can be closed to new applicants while the rest of the program keeps recruiting. For the two largest practitioner fields our sister sites rank the programs specifically: family nurse practitioner programs and psychiatric mental health programs.
What &Ldquo;Online” Actually Means For A DNP
The most misunderstood word on this page. A distance flag describes
how coursework is delivered and nothing else, and the gap between
that and what applicants assume is measured in flights and in hours.
The coursework is online. The practice hours never are
The federal survey records whether taught content can be delivered at a distance. It says nothing about clinical practice, and every accredited DNP carries roughly 1,000 supervised post-baccalaureate hours that happen in a facility with a preceptor physically present. A program marketed as fully online still places its students in buildings.
Campus days exist, and are rarely on the program page
The commitment ranges from none at all, through an orientation and a final defense, to annual multi-day intensives and in some cases a fixed weekday every week. Programs requiring the least tend to say so prominently. Programs requiring more tend to put it in the handbook. Ask for the number of days and the months they fall in, because that is what you hold against a roster.
Immersion does not always mean a campus visit
Some programs use the word for a block of clinical hours served near where you live, and others for days spent on campus. Two different commitments share one label, and the difference between them is a flight.
State authorization decides whether you may enroll at all
A distance program operates under authorization in each state and coverage is not universal. Several publish a list of states they cannot accept students from, a few restrict enrollment to a named group of states, and a program’s authority to enroll you is separate from its ability to place you for clinical hours near you. Settle this first, because it ends the question rather than complicating it.
Distance study does not buy the in-state rate
Residency is set by the state, not by where you sit to watch a lecture, so a distance student from out of state is commonly charged the out-of-state rate, a median of 2.2 times in-state across the publics here. A minority of institutions charge one rate to every online student, which is worth asking about because it is worth more than most differences in the ranking above.
The distance-ranked list is a different page
This page ranks the whole accredited field. Online DNP programs narrows it to the distance-flagged institutions and reweights the rubric toward programs that are established going concerns, because a thin program costs a distance student more than a campus student.
Applying To A DNP Program
What to have ready, in the order it becomes urgent. The steps that
depend on someone else, licensure by endorsement and a letter from a
former registrar, are the ones to start first.
1.Hold an active, unencumbered RN license, in the right state
Every program requires current licensure. What varies is where: a number require the license to be active in the state where your practicum will happen rather than wherever you hold one now, and some require it in place before the first term rather than at application. Licensure by endorsement takes months, so start it when you apply and not when you are accepted.
2.Meet the grade floor, and check which grades it counts
A 3.0 cumulative average is the common floor, with programs setting 3.2, 3.25 or 3.3, and a few asking 3.5 of any prior graduate work. The basis matters as much as the number: several calculate on the last 60 credits of the bachelor’s rather than the whole degree, which helps if you started slowly and finished well.
3.Check the GRE policy on the program page, not from a summary
Policy varies by program and has been changing, with schools announcing the requirement dropped or waived. This site publishes no proportion, because only a minority of institutions mention the exam anywhere in their published admission material and any share would describe our reading rather than the field. The program page is the only reliable answer.
4.Line up references who can speak to the work
Two or three is standard, and the constraints are where programs differ. Some require one from your current clinical supervisor, some require one from a nurse prepared at doctoral level, and at least one requires a referee who either practices in the role you are seeking or works alongside people who do. A manager who has never done the job may not qualify.
5.Arrive with a problem, not just an ambition
Several programs ask the application essay to name a clinical problem in your own practice setting and say what you would do about it, and at least one asks how you would spend your practice hours changing it. That is a project proposal in everything but name, and it is not written the night before a deadline.
6.Expect an interview, and expect it to matter
Interviews with graduate faculty are common and usually the last gate. At least one program states plainly that its cohort is capped and that meeting every published minimum does not assure admission, which is the honest version of what a capped cohort means everywhere.
7.Coming from a master’s: document the hours you already hold
How many of your master’s practice hours count is the biggest single variable in what this degree costs you in time, and programs will not take your word for it. Expect a verification form, and in several cases an official letter sent directly from the institution that awarded the master’s stating the exact number. Chasing a former registrar takes weeks.
8.Work backwards from the intake, because some have only one
Cohorts commonly start once a year, and a program admitting only in the fall means missing the date costs a year rather than a term. Others run two or three intakes, and a few accept applications year round or until the cohort fills, which makes a published deadline a ceiling rather than a target.
The route through the degree itself, from prerequisites to licensure,
is set out step by step in
how to become a DNP.
What The Degree Does And Does Not Grant
The finding this whole site is built on, and the one most likely to
change which program you apply to. A doctorate and a license are
different things, awarded by different bodies, for different reasons.
The degree is not the license
A degree confers no prescriptive authority. It comes from a state advanced practice license and the national certification behind it, so a DNP-prepared and a master’s-prepared nurse practitioner holding the same license prescribe the same things.
What the license actually attaches to
NCSBN recognizes 4 advanced practice roles and 6 population foci, and a certification attaches to a pairing of the two rather than to a doctorate. The foci are family or individual across the lifespan, adult-gerontology, neonatal, pediatrics, women’s health and gender-related and psychiatric and mental health. Changing which population you serve means new supervised hours and a new examination, whatever degree you hold.
Accreditation is the gate to the examination
Programmatic accreditation is required for a program preparing an advanced practice role. The bodies that administer the certification exams require the program to be accredited by an agency the Department of Education recognizes, so a graduate of an unaccredited APRN program cannot sit the exam that leads to the license.
Two roles answer to a second accreditor
Nurse anesthesia programs are accredited by the Council on Accreditation of Nurse Anesthesia Educational Programs, and nurse-midwifery programs by the Accreditation Commission for Midwifery Education, on top of the nursing accreditation every institution on this page holds. If either is your destination, that programmatic accreditation is a second thing to verify rather than an alternative to the first.
The tuition figure is one line of a longer bill. Where a figure is
not published by a source this site can cite, it says so rather than
estimating, because an invented number here is worse than none.
Fees, which the published tuition excludes
The federal survey publishes tuition. Institutions charge fees on top of it, and the ones billed per credit rather than per term are the ones that accumulate: technology, general student, distance learning and program fees all appear at this level. No national source collects them, so this site publishes no figure and the number has to come from the school.
Clinical placement charges
Some programs bill a placement or clinical fee per term or per rotation. At least one states outright that practicum brings travel, onboarding fees, per-term charges and liability insurance, which is more candor than most programs offer and no reason to think it unusual.
Malpractice cover, sometimes yours to carry
At least one program requires doctoral students to hold their own malpractice insurance for the duration of the degree. It is not large next to tuition, but it is a condition of enrollment rather than an optional extra, and it is easy to miss.
Continuation credits, when the project runs long
Billed per additional term by the programs that charge them, and invisible in every published schedule. Doctoral projects overrun for ordinary reasons, and at least one catalog carries a zero-credit course whose stated purpose is letting a student stay enrolled while finishing, with a candidacy fee attached to it.
Travel, for the campus days you already counted
An annual intensive is a flight, a hotel and days not worked, repeated for the length of the program. For a distance student living far from campus this is frequently the second largest cost after tuition, and it is the one most often left out of a comparison.
Certification and licensure, after you graduate
The examination fee, the state license application and the recurring renewal are real costs and none is set by the school. This site publishes no figures for them: they are set by the certifying bodies and the state boards, they change independently of anything here, and they would be stale before they were useful. The certifying body for your role publishes the current fee.
What can be set against these, including the federal repayment
programs and their service commitments, is in
paying for a DNP.
There is no single answer, and any page giving you one is ranking on something it has chosen for you. This list orders 307 accredited institutions on doctoral conferrals, published in-state tuition and institution-wide completion. Change the weights and the order changes, which is what the affordability and online lists on this site do.
How long does a DNP take?
It depends on the door you come in at rather than the school. Entering with a bachelor's is three to four years full-time; longer part-time. Entering with a master's in nursing is one to two years full-time; commonly longer part-time. The difference is most of the coursework and, on many programs, most of the practice hours.
How many clinical hours does a DNP require?
Around 1,000 supervised post-baccalaureate practice hours. What varies between programs is how many of them you arrive holding: some count a master's practicum in full, some cap what transfers, and some require every hour to be earned inside the program.
Is a DNP worth it over a master’s?
That turns on what you want to do rather than on what you will be allowed to do. Both routes reach the same advanced practice license, so the doctorate does not widen your scope. It is worth it where the destination is leading a service, teaching, or work that expects a terminal degree, and it is a long detour where the destination is a clinical panel.
Does every program on this list hold accreditation?
Yes, and it is the condition for appearing rather than a factor in the score. All 307 institutions hold CCNE accreditation for the DNP, so none earns points for it and none is listed without it.
2IPEDS Published tuition, conferrals and completion, and the in-state against out-of-state rates the 2.2x median is computed from across 158 public institutions.
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.
