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Graduate education authority site · Nursing research doctorates

Every nursing PhD in the United States, checked one school at a time.

The federal data says 180 universities award a research doctorate in nursing. Read their own doctoral listings and 42 of them award only a DNP. That gap is the whole project: a directory of 140 programs that were each confirmed against the school itself, ranked on two separate models, and published on pages a nursing adviser would send someone to.

Scope

Website DesignData EngineeringEducation SEOEditorial SystemsLink Strategy
Visit phdnursingprograms.com
140 programs at 138 universities 92 on campus, 48 online
42 institutions ruled out DNP-only, despite the federal data
46 states and territories Each with its own ranked page
$484M NINR funding behind the campus list NIH RePORTER, FY2021 to FY2025

The problem

The federal data was wrong about a third of the field.

IPEDS award level 17 is self-reported and nursing schools file it loosely, so a third of the institutions that appear to offer a research doctorate in the federal data offer only a DNP. All 180 were checked against the school's own doctoral-programs index and 42 were ruled out. The rejections did more for the site than the confirmations: they are the reason the count is 138 universities and not 180.

There is no accreditation column anywhere on the site, and that is a finding rather than an omission. CCNE and ACEN accredit BSN, MSN and DNP programs, and neither body accredits research doctorates, so there is no seal to check. What replaces it is where the research money comes from, taken from NIH RePORTER as National Institute of Nursing Research awards across FY2021 to FY2025.

A funded residential doctorate and one you pay for while keeping your nursing job are not the same purchase, and a single list buries the second every time. So campus and online run on separate models with different weights and are never merged, and each list is complete for its own kind rather than a top slice of a combined one.

The linkable spine

Two lists, three cuts, and a page for every state that has one.

A nurse who cannot move and a nurse who wants to be paid to study are asking different questions, so they get different pages. Each one is complete for its own kind rather than a slice of a combined ranking.

The campus ranking

Research money and student funding carry nearly half the score

A research doctorate is an apprenticeship, and what you are apprenticed to is funded work. So the campus model weights National Institute of Nursing Research awards at 25 percent and what a program pays its own doctoral students at 22 percent, with doctoral scale, time to degree and two smaller factors behind them. Ninety-two programs at 91 universities, and 19 of them fund the students they admit.

See the campus nursing PhD ranking
The four numbers that set up the list sit above it, before a single program is named.

The cut that decides it

Twenty programs say on their own pages that they pay you

Funding turns a five-year purchase into a five-year low-paid job, and it changes the arithmetic more than any other fact on a program page. Twenty programs across 13 states publish both tuition support and a stipend for full-time doctoral students. Nineteen of them are campus-based, which is the honest answer to whether an online nursing PhD can be funded.

Open the funded programs ranking
One online program out of twenty. The page leads with that rather than burying it.

Architecture

There are no per-school pages, because the card is the page

A thin profile page for each of 140 schools would have been the easy build and the wrong one. Instead each school carries its full write-up on the ranking it competes on, and the A to Z directory points into those cards, linking a school both to the national list and to its own state page. One program, written up twice against two different comparison sets, rather than 140 pages nobody would cite.

Browse all 140 programs
The directory is an index into the rankings, not a third copy of the same data.

The citation path

Source, useful page, natural linker.

Link earning starts with the person who would need the resource. The architecture makes that path explicit instead of publishing content first and hunting for a reason to promote it later.

Primary evidence Published resource Who needs it
NIH RePORTER, NINR awards FY2021 to FY2025 The campus ranking and the factor breakdown on every card Nursing schools, deans and research offices comparing where the funding sits
The schools' own doctoral pages, read program by program The funding, BSN-entry and GRE cuts Prospective students, faculty advisers and nursing program directors
BLS OEWS medians for nursing instructors and registered nurses The salary silo and the pay figure on every state page Workforce writers, faculty recruiters and reporters covering the faculty shortage

The index

Where a citation should land.

Two national rankings, three cuts by what usually decides the choice, a reference silo, and a page for every state with a program. Each one answers a question a nurse or an adviser is already asking, which is what makes it citable rather than promotable.

The two national rankings

Cut by what usually decides it

The same 140 programs, filtered three ways.

Reference silos

Method, careers, pay and the decision guides.

Northeast

6 states, and the densest concentration of programs in the country.

Midwest

12 states, most of them with a single program carrying the whole state.

South

18 states and territories, including the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico.

West

10 states, where distance makes the online list matter more.

Build

Technical foundation

Astro
TypeScript
Tailwind CSS
Cloudflare Workers
Schema.org JSON-LD
Citation verification pipeline

Launch inventory

What shipped

  • 140 research doctorates at 138 universities, each one confirmed against the school's own doctoral listings.
  • Two national rankings on separate scoring models, plus three category cuts for funding, BSN entry and the GRE.
  • 46 state rankings, each carrying that state's nursing faculty pay against the national median.
  • An A to Z directory of all 140 programs that links every school to both the national list and its state page.
  • A build that fails if a quoted passage is not on the page it cites, checked against planted fakes before it was trusted.

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Need a graduate authority site a nursing school would cite?

We verify the programs one at a time, publish the model we scored them on, and build the pages faculty and advisers send people to.

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