Best Nursing schools
Graduate nursing schools. Advanced practice nursing is licensed and scope-limited by jurisdiction, and clinical placement capacity — not ranking — is often the binding constraint on admission.
Before the ranking matters
- Licensure and scope of practice vary by state and country
- What a nurse practitioner is permitted to do independently differs sharply between jurisdictions. That governs both your training requirements and your eventual autonomy.
- Clinical placements limit class size
- Programmes are capped by the clinical hours they can supply, which is why admission can be more competitive than a school's overall selectivity suggests.
- Specialty is chosen at application
- Nurse anaesthesia, midwifery, family practice and acute care are largely separate tracks with separate admission and separate rankings — the school-level band above averages across them.
These rank programmes, not universities. A school's band here is independent of its university's overall position on this site — professional schools admit separately, are funded separately, and are ranked by different publications on different criteria. Where a row shows a university rank too, treat the two numbers as answering different questions.
Consensus band across US News Best Nursing Schools for the US tier, with QS/THE nursing where relevant. Positions are bands, never a single publication's exact number for a single year (2025–26 rankings cycle). Coverage stops at the well-documented top tier; absence means outside that tier, not unranked.
Starring a row saves the university to your shortlist, since that's the level the rest of this site works at. Standalone graduate schools with no undergraduate institution here can't be starred.