How the list is checked
RN to BSN Programs That Are Closed but Still Listed
What Came Off the List
Every program on this site was opened and read before it was published. That is the slow part of the work and it is the only part that catches a closure, because the federal file and a live admissions page can disagree for a year or more without anything flagging it.
1,112 institutions report a bachelor's degree in nursing to IPEDS under a single code. 362 of those were confirmed as completion tracks a licensed nurse can apply to. 38 across 21 states came off: 17 where the school's own page states the program is closed or not taking applications, and 21 where the institution's own program list contains no post-licensure track at all.
Those two groups are different claims and this post keeps them apart. One is a closure the school has announced. The other is an absence, which is a weaker thing to say and is said more carefully below.
Programs the School Says Are Closed
17 of the 38 are closures in the institution's own words. Two of them, quoted exactly as the page had them:
We are no longer accepting admissions to the RN to BSN program after Summer 2024.
Baptist Health Sciences University, TN — read 2026-09-11
Apologies, UIU is no longer accepting applications to the 4-year, online RN-BSN program.
Upper Iowa University, IA — read 2026-09-11. The RN-BSN address now redirects to the school's pre-nursing page, where that sentence sits.
The pattern worth noticing is where these notices sit. They are banners at the top of
a page whose body was never changed, so the tuition tables, the admission
requirements and the start dates are all still there underneath.
Mercy University's page is the clearest case: its banner states the program
is no longer accepting applications from new students
, and the page below
it reads exactly as it did when it was recruiting.
That page carried the notice when it was read on 2026-09-11.
A reader who skims past the banner, or who arrives from a search result that lands further down, sees a program that looks open.
Programs the Catalog Does Not Contain
The other 21 are a quieter problem and a weaker claim, so here is exactly what it means: the institution has a federal row under this code, and its own published program list does not include a post-licensure track for licensed nurses. No closure notice, no announcement, nothing to find.
Charleston Southern University is representative. There is no RN-to-BSN page on the site, and
its College of Nursing page accounts for the whole offering in one sentence —
The College of Nursing consists of two undergraduate degree options and one
graduate degree program, with two emphases
— without a completion track among
them.
That page was read on 2026-09-11.
That is not a statement that no such program exists anywhere at the institution. Catalogs are incomplete, programs run under names a search does not match, and a department can offer something its own index has not caught up with. It is a statement about what the school publishes, which is the only thing a nurse comparing programs can actually read — and it is why these rows are recorded as absences rather than counted as programs.
When One Page Contradicts Another
The case most worth a reader's attention is La Salle University, because nothing about it is hidden and it would still catch someone. The program page carries a banner stating the RN-BSN program is not currently accepting applications. That is the controlling page, and it was read on 2026-09-11.
The admissions sub-page underneath it says something else. It states that the program reviews applications on a rolling basis and lists term deadlines — Fall I, Fall II, Spring I, Spring II, Summer I and Summer II, each with a date — and it carries no closure notice at all. That sub-page is a perfectly ordinary thing to find from a search for application deadlines, and a nurse who lands on it would reasonably start assembling transcripts.
No motive needs inventing here. A sub-page nobody revisited after the parent page changed is the most common defect on the web. The cost simply does not fall on the school. It falls on whoever reads the wrong page first, which is the argument for checking the program page before the deadline page every time.
What Could Not Be Settled
106 federal rows are recorded as unresolved, and the honest thing about them is that this site publishes them in neither direction. They are not listed as programs and they are not listed as closures. The evidence was ambiguous, or two campuses could not be told apart from the institution's own pages.
So a program missing from this site has not been judged. It may be real and simply unconfirmed. That is a less satisfying answer than a number, and it is the reason the published count is 362 rather than something larger: the honest count is the smaller one. This post quotes two of the 38 removals and cites three more; the methodology lists every one with its source, which is the full record rather than the selection here.
Checking a Program Before You Apply
Four minutes of reading saves a transcript request. For any program on any list, including this one:
- Open the school's own program page rather than a directory, and read the top of it before the body. Closure notices are banners; marketing copy is the page underneath.
- Check the admissions or application sub-page separately. If the two disagree, the page that says closed is the one to believe.
- Treat an undated page as unverified. A deadline with no year attached has usually been sitting there a while.
- Email admissions and ask one question: are you accepting applications from licensed RNs for the next intake? A sentence back settles it.
Programs reopen, too. Everything above was read between 2026-09-11 and 2026-09-15, every record carries the page and the date it came from, and the school's own page is always the authority over anything published here. If something on this list is taking applications again, the dataset is what needs correcting.