Nursing Master’s Programs With 100% Admit Rates

By Ilana Kowarski, Nursing Master’s Programs With 100% Admit Rates, on USNews.com

Everyone who applied to these nursing master’s programs for fall 2018 admission was accepted.

The U.S. News Short List, separate from our overall rankings, is a regular series that magnifies individual data points in hopes of providing students and parents a way to find which undergraduate or graduate programs excel or have room to grow in specific areas. Be sure to explore The Short List: College, The Short List: Grad School and The Short List: Online Programs to find data that matter to you in your college or grad school search.

Anyone who hopes to become an advanced practice registered nurse, such as a nurse practitioner, nurse anesthetist or nurse midwife, should understand that this career path typically requires at least a master’s degree in nursing.

Those who opt to attend graduate nursing school can expect to gain highly marketable skills that will make them competitive for numerous jobs. An employment forecast from the Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts that the number of jobs for advanced practice registered nurses will increase by 31% between 2016 and 2026.

Prospective students who are searching for nursing master’s programs where they have a good chance of acceptance may want to apply to programs that admit nearly everyone who applies. Among the 229 ranked nursing master’s programs that provided fall 2018 admissions statistics to U.S. News in an annual survey and indicated that they had received 10 or more applications, 14 schools reported 100% acceptance rates.

Half of these 14 schools were ranked in the bottom quarter of the 2020 Best Nursing Schools: Master’s Programs rankings and are listed with a ranking range. Among the remaining seven programs with specific numerical ranks, two cracked the top 100.

The nursing master’s programs with the highest acceptance rates are based in a variety of geographic regions, with four in the Midwest, three in the Northeast, five in the South and two in the West. Each master’s program that admitted all of its applicants accepted fewer than 84 students.

However, there are some extraordinarily selective nursing master’s programs that received and rejected hundreds of applications, such as the University of California—Irvine, which admitted only 8.8% of the 330 people who sought spots in the fall 2018 entering class.

Below are the 14 nursing graduate schools, listed in alphabetical order, which received at least 10 master’s program applicants in fall 2018 and admitted all of them. Unranked schools, which did not meet certain criteria required by U.S. News to be numerically ranked, were not considered for this report.

Don’t see your school on this list? Access the U.S. News Nursing School Compass to find acceptance rate data, complete rankings and much more. School officials can access historical data and rankings, including of peer institutions, via U.S. News Academic Insights.

U.S. News surveyed 584 nursing schools for our 2018 survey of nursing programs. Schools self-reported myriad data regarding their academic programs and the makeup of their student body, among other areas, making U.S. News’ data the most accurate and detailed collection of college facts and figures of its kind. While U.S. News uses much of this survey data to rank schools for our annual Best Nursing Schools rankings, the data can also be useful when examined on a smaller scale. U.S. News will now produce lists of data, separate from the overall rankings, meant to provide students and parents a means to find which schools excel, or have room to grow, in specific areas that are important to them. While the data come from the schools themselves, these lists are not related to, and have no influence over, U.S. News’ rankings of Best Colleges, Best Graduate Schools or Best Online Programs. The admissions data above is correct as of Aug. 27, 2019.