If you pursue a doctor's degree in nursing science, you won't be alone. The field of study is the #29 most popular program in the country. This means there are lots of options to choose from when you decide to get your degree.
In 2024, College Factual analyzed 99 schools in order to identify the top ones for its Best Nursing Science Doctor's Degree Schools ranking. When you put them all together, these colleges and universities awarded 950 doctor's degrees in nursing science during the 2020-2021 academic year.
Choosing a Great Nursing Science School for Your Doctor's Degree
The nursing science doctor's degree program you select can have a big impact on your future. This section explores some of the factors we include in our ranking and how much they vary depending on the school you select. To make it into this list, a school must excel in the following areas.
A Great Overall School
The overall quality of a doctor's degree school is important to ensure a good education, not just how well they do in a particular major. To make it into this list a school must rank well in our overall Best Colleges for a Doctor's Degree ranking. This ranking considered factors such as graduation rates, overall graduate earnings and other educational resources to identify great colleges and universities.
Other Factors We Consider
In addition to the above, you should consider some of the following factors:
Major Focus - How many resources a school devotes to nursing science students as compared to other majors.
Major Demand - The number of nursing science students who choose to seek a doctor's degree at the school.
Educational Resources - The amount of money and other resources allocated to students while they are pursuing their degree. These resources include such things as number of students per instructor and education expenditures per student.
Accreditation - Whether a school is regionally accredited and/or accredited by a recognized nursing science related body.
Our complete ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best colleges for nursing science students working on their doctor's degree.
Since the program you select can have a significant impact on your future, we've developed a number of rankings, including this Best Nursing Science Doctor's Degree Schools list, to help you choose the best school for you.
Best Schools for Doctorate Students to Study Nursing Science in the United States
Below you'll see a list of the best colleges and universities for pursuing a doctor's degree in nursing science. Only those schools that rank in the top 15% of all the schools we analyze get awarded with a place on this list.
Duke University is one of the best schools in the country for getting a doctor's degree in nursing science. Located in the city of Durham, Duke is a private not-for-profit university with a fairly large student population.More information about a doctorate in nursing science from Duke University
These are some additional schools worth mentioning that are also great but just didn't quite make the cut to earn our top Best Nursing Science Doctor's Degree Schools award.
The bars on the spread charts above show the distribution of the schools on this list +/- one standard deviation from the mean.
The Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), a branch of the U.S. Department of Education (DOE) serves as the core of the rest of our data about colleges.
Some other college data, including much of the graduate earnings data, comes from the U.S. Department of Education’s (College Scorecard).