Methodology

Inclusion criteria (“Top Nursing Schools in [State]”)

A school is listed on state, degree and specialty pages when all of the following are true:

1. Verified nursing offering. It reported at least one award in licensed nursing education (practical/vocational nursing or the registered-nursing family, CIP 51.38/51.3901) in the latest IPEDS completions survey, or we verified a nursing program on its official website. Nursing-assistant-only schools appear only on CNA pages.
2. Traceable official sources. Every fact shown links to an official dataset, an accreditor's directory, a board of nursing or the school's own website.
3. Sufficient current information. The institution is active in the latest IPEDS directory file and its listing shows at least its location, ownership and the nursing award levels it reported.

Listing is editorial selection, not a ranking. It does not certify educational quality and does not guarantee eligibility for licensure or certification. Default order is alphabetical. Where comparable data exists you can re-sort by a factual measure — nursing awards reported to IPEDS (a measure of size, not quality) or institution-wide in-state undergraduate tuition — and the page says so next to the results. There are no numbered ranks, grades or scores. A scored ranking would need a defensible, published methodology and comparable data for every school; we have neither yet.

Sources

• IPEDS (U.S. Department of Education, NCES) — institution directory (HD2024), completions by field and award level for July 2023 to June 2024 (C2024_A), student charges for 2023–24 (IC2023_AY) and 12-month enrollment (EFFY2024). Award levels tell us which nursing credentials a school conferred; they do not name programs, pathways (ABSN vs RN-to-BSN) or formats, so we never infer those from IPEDS.
• CCNE and ACEN public directories — the degree levels each body lists as accredited at an institution, with dates where published. Records are matched to IPEDS institutions by name and state; ambiguous matches are left for an editor, never guessed. Candidacy is shown as candidacy, not accreditation.
• Official school websites, boards of nursing and other accreditors (COA, ACME) — for individual program facts.

How program facts are verified

1. Each fact is recorded with the official page it came from and a verbatim quote that contains the value.
2. An automated check re-opens the page (including PDFs) and confirms the quote is really there. Facts that fail stay hidden.
3. Pages behind bot-protection walls are never bypassed: those facts stay hidden until an editor opens the page and confirms the quote by hand.
4. An editor reviews inferences before publication — for example a university-wide tuition table attached to a nursing program, a college-wide NCLEX figure attached to one program, or dates matched to terms by column position. Those are removed.
5. Verified data is never overwritten silently. A different value from a new import opens a review flag for an editor.

Rules we apply to the data

• Unknown is not “no”: no verified test requirement does not mean “no test”; no accreditor record does not mean “unaccredited”.
• Tuition keeps its applicant category and fee basis. Per-credit, per-term, annual and total-program figures are never compared as equivalent.
• Institution-wide figures (tuition, enrollment) are labelled as such and never presented as nursing statistics.
• NCLEX results are shown only with their year and tested population and only on the prelicensure program or campus they describe.
• Deadlines are shown with the year the school printed. Past deadlines are marked as passed, never rolled forward.
• An online program's home state does not tell you which states' residents can enroll; we show eligible states only when the school publishes them.

Coverage today

• 2,443 schools with licensed-nurse education across all 50 states, DC and US territories (IPEDS 2023–24).
• 1,602 of them have at least one CCNE or ACEN directory record matched.
• 315 verified program profiles at 52 schools. Program research is expanding state by state; most schools are not yet covered at program level.

We do not claim nationwide completeness at program level, and figures change. Found an error? Request a correction. Represent a school? Submit program details.

Sponsorship

Sponsored placements are labelled, shown in their own section, targeted by state, program or specialty, and expire automatically. They never decide which schools are listed or in what order, and never change a fact. See advertising.