About RN to BSN

This site ranks 290 RN-to-BSN programs across 24 states, drawn from the 362 programs we were able to confirm actually run a completion track for licensed nurses. That confirmation step is the whole point of the site. The federal data does not make the distinction, so a list built straight from the federal code is ranking four-year pre-licensure degrees and handing them to a reader who cannot enroll in one.

Who Writes This

Taylor holds a B.A. in Psychology from the University of Washington Seattle and a B.S. in Computer Science from Oregon State University. He edits this site and does the research behind it.

Worth saying plainly, on a site read mostly by people who hold one: there is no nursing license behind this work. Taylor Rupe is an editor and a researcher, not a nurse, and has no clinical training, no bedside experience and no credential in nursing of any kind.

That shapes what this site will and will not do. It does not tell you what the work is like, what a floor feels like at hour eleven, or which specialty to move into. You know all of that better than the person writing this. What it does instead is narrower and checkable: take the federal record, test it against what each school publishes about its own program, and show the working. Every figure on the site names the source it came from, and the methodology sets out the scoring in full, weights and omissions together. The claim being made here is that the inputs are auditable, not that the author is a clinician.

How a Program Gets on This Site

IPEDS files an RN-to-BSN completion track and a traditional pre-licensure BSN under the same code, CIP 51.3801 at bachelor's level, and nothing in the federal data separates them. We checked all 1,112 bachelor's programs in that code against the text of each school's own program page. 362 of them are confirmed to run a completion track, and only those are eligible to be ranked.

Each determination carries the evidence behind it. The strongest is a program named in the school's own page title or URL — a page called "RN to BSN", or one sitting at an /rn-bsn/ address. Next is an RN-to-BSN, BSN completion or post-licensure track described in the body of a broader nursing page.

The 106 unresolved records involve ambiguous program wording or a campus identity that needs verification. An online division's program cannot establish eligibility for every campus in the same university system. Absence from this site is not, by itself, a finding that a school does not run a completion track. Separately verified closures and admissions pauses are recorded in the program-status audit.

A confirmed program is then ranked only if it has in-state tuition, an institutional graduation rate, and at least 10 degrees conferred a year. The 72 confirmed programs that do not clear that bar stay in the full program directory and below the ranking where a state page exists, with the reason shown. An unranked program is one where a required federal field is empty or the award count is below our threshold; no page here presents it as a judgment about the program.

Where the Data Comes From

Programs, tuition, graduation rates and degrees conferred come from IPEDS, the federal survey every institution taking Title IV funding has to complete. Completion-track status and delivery format come from each school's own program page, fetched and read rather than assumed. Salaries come from BLS OEWS, May 2025 release, SOC 29-1141 (Registered Nurses).

That wage survey reports all RNs as a single occupation and does not break pay out by degree, so no figure anywhere on this site is presented as what a BSN earns. No number here is modelled, estimated or carried over from somewhere else.

What the Scoring Deliberately Leaves Out

Programs are scored on two factors: cost at 55% and institutional graduation rate at 45%. The omissions are as much a decision as the weights, and the one that matters most is delivery format.

Delivery is not scored, and it is the factor you probably care about most. Whether classes run asynchronously, and whether a program expects precepted hours you have to arrange around your own shifts, decides whether the degree is finishable at all. We would weight it heavily if the evidence supported it. Schools say whether a program is online or on campus for only 70% of the programs on this site, so scoring it would mean inventing the rest of the inputs and presenting the result as a measurement. Instead delivery is carried as a labeled fact wherever the school states it — 253 programs — and left off the page where it doesn't.

The graduation rate is published with its own limitation attached. IPEDS measures graduation for first-time, full-time, degree-seeking undergraduates, and an RN-to-BSN student is none of those three. It is an institutional signal rather than a measurement of the completion cohort, which is exactly why it sits below cost in the weighting instead of above it.

Accreditation is not scored either. The federal DAPIP file has a live baccalaureate nursing accreditation record for 342 of the 362 programs we list. Ranking cards show the bodies on file with the source and retrieval date; an absent record is not a finding that a program is unaccredited. The methodology page carries the full list of exclusions with the reasoning for each.

How This Site Makes Money

This site may receive compensation when readers request information from or enroll in programs featured here. Sponsored placements are labeled. Accreditation status, wage data, and program structure data are sourced directly from official records and are reported the same way regardless of partnership status.

Sponsored placements are labeled as sponsored wherever they appear, and they are never mixed into a ranking. No school can pay to be ranked higher, to be added to a list, or to have a competitor taken off one. No school has been shown its position before publication.

Corrections

If a figure here is wrong, it is worth telling us and it will be changed. Every number traces to a named source and every program links the school page it was read from, so a correction can be checked rather than argued about. The two most useful things to send are a program we have filed on the wrong side of the completion-track line, and a school page that contradicts what we show. Write to help@hakia.com. Corrections are made to the underlying data, so a fix updates every page that uses it rather than patching one sentence.