144 institutions with a
CCNE-accredited Doctor of Nursing Practice deliver it at a distance, about 47% of all accredited
institutions. The
coursework is remote. The clinical hours are not, and no accredited
DNP awards the degree without them.
By the Best DNP programs editorial team ·
Reviewed
144Institutions Ranked, Distance-DeliveredIPEDS distance flag
The flag is the federal survey’s, not the school’s.IPEDS records whether a program is offered at a distance, and 47% of accredited DNP programs are flagged that way — a school’s own marketing may describe a hybrid program as online, or an online one as hybrid.
2
Online covers the coursework only.Every accredited DNP requires 1,000 supervised post-baccalaureate practice hours, and no distance format removes them.
3
Established matters more at a distance.A thin or newly launched program costs a distance student more than a campus student, because there is no faculty corridor to absorb what the program does not organize — which is why conferral volume leads the weighting here.
4
A position here is a position among these.Scores are relative to the 144 distance-delivered institutions on this page, so the same school carries a different number on the national list.
How This Ranking Is Scored
Three published figures, weighted. Scores are relative to the
144 institutions on this page and to nothing
else.
60%
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.
10%
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 Online DNP Programs In 2026, Ranked
Weighted toward whether a program is an established going concern,
because distance study is where a thin or newly launched program
costs a student most. There is no campus to absorb the gaps.
Scores are relative to these 144 institutions only.
What the federal record publishes for each program, and how the three
factors combined into its score.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
3 DNP tracks at this
institution, Clinical Nurse Specialist, 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
2 DNP tracks at this
institution, Maternal/Child Health and Neonatal Nurse/Nursing, Public Health/Community Nurse/Nursing. 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
2 DNP tracks at this
institution, Clinical Nurse Specialist, Nursing practice (general). 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The flag on this page comes from the federal education survey,
where an institution reports whether a program can be completed
through distance education. It describes the delivery of taught
content: lectures, seminars, assessment.
It does not describe clinical practice. Doctoral nursing education
carries a supervised practice requirement in the region of
1,000 hours, and
those hours happen in clinics and hospitals with a
preceptor physically present. A program marketed as fully online
still places its students in facilities.
Two further requirements are commonly missed by applicants reading
only the word "online". Many programs hold periodic on-campus
intensives, and some use the word "immersion" for a clinical block
rather than a campus visit, the two are not the same
commitment. Whether a program finds placements for you or expects
you to source them yourself varies widely and is rarely on the
program page; it is in the handbook.
Distance delivery also does not free a program from state
regulation of where it may operate. Programs participate in a
reciprocity agreement covering most states, but coverage is not
universal, and a program's ability to enroll you is separate from
its ability to place you for clinical hours near where you live.
What To Verify Before You Enroll
None of the five below appears in the federal record, so no ranking
can sort on them. Each one varies enough between programs to change
which is the right choice, and each is answerable in one email.
Whether the program may enroll you at all
Distance programs operate under state authorization, and coverage is not universal. Several publish a list of states they cannot accept students from, and a few restrict enrollment to a named group of states. This is the one to settle first, because it decides the application before any other question is worth asking.
Whether "online" comes with a geography
Some programs run remotely but require you to be within reach of a particular state or city by a given semester, because that is where the clinical placements are. Others require licensure in the state where the practicum happens rather than wherever you hold a license now. Both conditions are usually a sentence deep inside an admissions page rather than on the program page.
How many campus visits, and when
The commitment ranges from none at all to a fixed weekday every week, with annual intensives, multi-day residencies and an orientation plus a final defense in between. A number of days is a figure you can hold against a roster. Flexible is not.
Who finds your preceptor
Some schools employ placement staff and secure every site for you. Some place you for coursework and leave the residency to you. Some leave all of it to you. Sourcing a preceptor is the step that most often stalls a distance student, so the answer changes what the program is worth more than most of the figures do.
How many of your existing hours count
The requirement is around 1,000 post-baccalaureate hours, and what a program lets you carry in from a master's varies from all of them to none. Caps, floors and documentation rules differ, and several require a letter sent directly from the institution that awarded the master's. Ask for the number in writing before you enroll.
Where a program on this page states one of these conditions in
writing, it is in that school’s card below.
Not entirely, and no accredited program claims otherwise. The coursework can be delivered at a distance, which is what the federal flag on this page records, but the degree carries roughly 1,000 supervised post-baccalaureate practice hours and those happen in clinics and hospitals with a preceptor physically present.
Is an online DNP respected the same as a campus one?
All 144 institutions on this page hold CCNE accreditation for the doctorate, which is the condition state boards and employers verify. Accreditation attaches to the program rather than to its delivery mode, and the federal survey records delivery as an attribute of the same accredited program.
Do online DNP programs cost less?
Not reliably. The distance-flagged institutions sit throughout this ranking rather than clustering at the cheap end, and studying remotely does not make you a resident of the state that sets a public university's in-state rate. Tuition on this page is the published annual figure, not a program total.
Can I do the clinical hours where I live?
Sometimes, and it is worth asking directly rather than assuming. A program’s authority to enroll a student in your state is separate from its ability to place that student for clinical hours near them, and some programs coordinate placements only within a defined region.
Does an online DNP let me prescribe?
Delivery mode has nothing to do with it. Prescriptive authority comes from a state advanced practice license and the national certification behind it, and a board does not ask where the coursework was taught. What matters is that the program is accredited and that its clinical track leads to the certification you intend to sit.
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.
