Version 1.0
How We Rank RN to BSN Programs
First, We Remove the Programs You Cannot Enroll In
This is the part that matters most, and it is the reason our lists do not look like everyone else's.
The federal government files an RN-to-BSN completion track and a traditional pre-licensure BSN under the same code — CIP 51.3801, bachelor's level. Nothing in the federal data separates them. So if you rank that code straight, the top of your list fills with pre-licensure programs: four-year, on-campus degrees for people who are not nurses yet. A licensed RN with an ADN cannot enroll in them, and would not want to. Ranked lists built that way are describing a different degree to a different person.
We checked all 1,112 bachelor's programs in that code against the text of each school's own program page. A program passed only when the page named the completion track, and each determination carries the evidence that produced it:
- Named in the page title or URL — the strongest evidence. The
school's own page is called "RN to BSN" or sits at a
/rn-bsn/address. - Named in the page body — the school describes an RN-to-BSN, RN-BSN, BSN completion or post-licensure track inside a broader nursing page.
The 106 unresolved records include ambiguous track wording and campus-identity questions. A phrase such as "for registered nurses" does not by itself establish a completion track. An online program's requirements also cannot establish a separate campus's eligibility. These records remain outside the rankings until the program and reporting institution are matched.
Then We Check That You Can Still Apply
A page that mentions an RN-to-BSN is not the same as a program that will admit you. Our first pass often landed on a school's general nursing page, which lists the completion track next to the traditional one whether or not it is still running. So every program that passed was checked again, against its own RN-to-BSN page on the school's website, and any program that came back closed or missing was checked a second time, independently, before we took it off.
That removed 38 programs. 17 are closed or no longer accepting applications, in the school's own words. The other 21 do not offer a completion track at that institution at all: some are campuses of a university that now runs its RN-to-BSN only through a separate online division, and the rest have dropped it from their current catalog or never offered it. What remains is 362 programs a licensed RN can apply to, and only those are eligible for our rankings.
The 38 programs we removed, with the source for each
- Abilene Christian University (Texas) — no completion track at this institution. Source
- Abilene Christian University-Undergraduate Online (Texas) — no completion track at this institution. Source
- Baptist Health Sciences University (Tennessee) — closed to new students. Source
- Charleston Southern University (South Carolina) — no completion track at this institution. Source
- Fisher College (Massachusetts) — closed to new students. Source
- Hardin-Simmons University (Texas) — no completion track at this institution. Source
- La Salle University (Pennsylvania) — closed to new students. Source
- Lipscomb University (Tennessee) — closed to new students. Source
- Mercy University (New York) — closed to new students. Source
- Mount St. Joseph University (Ohio) — no completion track at this institution. Source
- Nightingale College (Utah) — closed to new students. Source
- Palm Beach Atlantic University (Florida) — no completion track at this institution. Source
- Pennsylvania State University-Penn State Abington (Pennsylvania) — no completion track at this institution. Source
- Pennsylvania State University-Penn State New Kensington (Pennsylvania) — no completion track at this institution. Source
- Pennsylvania State University-Penn State Shenango (Pennsylvania) — closed to new students. Source
- Ponce Health Sciences University-East (Puerto Rico) — closed to new students. Source
- Provo College (Utah) — no completion track at this institution. Source
- Robert Morris University (Pennsylvania) — closed to new students. Source
- Saint Anselm College (New Hampshire) — no completion track at this institution. Source
- Saint Joseph's College of Maine (Maine) — closed to new students. Source
- Saint Mary-of-the-Woods College (Indiana) — no completion track at this institution. Source
- South University-Austin (Texas) — no completion track at this institution. Source
- South University-Columbia (South Carolina) — no completion track at this institution. Source
- South University-High Point (North Carolina) — no completion track at this institution. Source
- South University-Montgomery (Alabama) — no completion track at this institution. Source
- South University-Richmond (Virginia) — no completion track at this institution. Source
- South University-Tampa (Florida) — no completion track at this institution. Source
- South University-Virginia Beach (Virginia) — no completion track at this institution. Source
- South University-West Palm Beach (Florida) — no completion track at this institution. Source
- Southern Illinois University-Carbondale (Illinois) — closed to new students. Source
- The University of Tennessee Southern (Tennessee) — no completion track at this institution. Source
- The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston (Texas) — closed to new students. Source
- University of Arkansas Grantham (Arkansas) — closed to new students. Source
- University of Houston-Clear Lake (Texas) — closed to new students. Source
- University of Nevada-Las Vegas (Nevada) — no completion track at this institution. Source
- University of the Virgin Islands (VI) — closed to new students. Source
- Upper Iowa University (Iowa) — closed to new students. Source
- Widener University (Pennsylvania) — closed to new students. Source
Checked September 11, 2026 and September 14, 2026 and September 15, 2026. If a school reopens its program, it goes back on the list at the next check.
If a program is missing from this site, that means we could not establish it runs a completion track a licensed RN can enroll in today — not that it doesn't.
What We Score
Confirmed programs are scored out of 100 on two factors. Both are normalized against the ranked cohort, so a score means "compared with other RN-to-BSN programs" and nothing else.
| Factor | Weight | What it measures |
|---|---|---|
| Cost | 55% | Annual in-state tuition, scored against the full range across ranked programs. Weighted highest because it is the most decision-relevant number that is actually populated for this field — only 10 of the 362 programs on this site are missing it — and because the spread is enormous: the cheapest tenth of ranked programs charge $2,467 a year or less, and the most expensive tenth $36,150 or more. Most RN-to-BSN students are working adults paying out of pocket or against a capped employer benefit. Source: IPEDS reported tuition. |
| Institutional graduation rate | 45% | The share of entering students at the institution who finish their degree. The median across ranked programs is 51%; the 23 programs that report tuition but no graduation rate are listed unranked rather than scored on cost alone. Read this factor with its limitation in mind, which we would rather state than bury: IPEDS measures graduation for first-time, full-time, degree-seeking undergraduates, and an RN-to-BSN student is by definition none of those three. It is an institutional signal, not a measurement of the completion cohort, and it is weighted below cost for exactly that reason. Source: IPEDS institutional graduation rate. |
What Has to Be Present Before We Rank a Program
A program is ranked only when it reports in-state tuition, reports an institutional graduation rate, and confers at least 10 degrees a year.
The award threshold exists because of what happened without it. An earlier version of this model scored programs on whichever factor they had and adjusted the weights to compensate. The result put a school graduating two nurses a year above the University of Florida, on the strength of a single graduation-rate figure and no tuition data at all. Partial data still produces a number. It does not produce a comparable one.
72 confirmed programs do not clear that bar. They are still listed in the full program directory and, where a state has a ranking page, below that ranking with the reason shown. Unranked here means a required federal field is empty or the award count is below the threshold. It is not a judgment about the program and we do not present it as one.
What We Deliberately Do Not Score
The omissions say as much as the weights, so here they are.
- Delivery format. The most important factor to this audience, and still too unevenly documented to score. Schools state whether the program is online or requires campus attendance for 253 of the 362 programs on this site (70%), counting both the program pages we hold and the 266 programs we have profiled in depth. It is shown wherever the school states it and left blank otherwise, rather than being scored from guesses for the rest.
- Accreditation. Shown on ranking cards where it is on file, rather than scored. 342 of the 362 programs on this site (94%) resolve to a live baccalaureate nursing accreditation in the U.S. Department of Education's accreditation database: 247 hold CCNE, 107 hold ACEN, 17 of those hold both, and 6 hold NLN CNEA. Three bodies accredit baccalaureate nursing, not two, and a program holding any one of them is accredited. It stays out of the score because at 94% it separates almost nothing, and the remaining 6% is a gap in the federal file rather than a finding about the program.
- Selectivity / admission rate. Reported for only about two-thirds of ranked programs, and conceptually wrong here. RN-to-BSN completion programs admit licensed nurses who clear a GPA floor; the institution-wide admission rate describes the freshman class, which is a different group of people applying to a different thing.
- Time to completion. Stated for 171 of the 362 programs on this site (47%). Where a school publishes a completion time it is shown on the program, but there is not enough coverage to rank on it.
The first one deserves emphasis, because it is the factor you probably care about most. Whether a program is fully online, whether the classes are asynchronous, and whether it demands precepted clinical hours you have to arrange yourself will decide whether the degree is finishable around your shifts. We would weight it heavily if we could. But schools state a delivery mode 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 we show delivery as a labeled fact wherever the school states it — 253 programs — and show nothing where it doesn't.
Where the Numbers Come From
- Programs, tuition, graduation rates and awards — IPEDS, the federal survey every institution receiving Title IV funding must complete.
- Completion-track status, whether a program is still admitting, and delivery — each school's own program page.
- Salaries — BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, May 2025 release, for registered nurses. That survey reports all RNs as one occupation and does not break pay out by degree, so we never present a figure as "what a BSN earns".
The Current Cohort
- 290 ranked programs across 24 states with enough programs to publish a state ranking.
- In-state tuition among ranked programs runs from $970 to $51,569 a year.
- Scores are recalculated whenever the underlying federal data is refreshed.
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. They are never mixed into a ranking, and no school can pay to be ranked higher, to be added, or to have a competitor removed.