ASU's Department of Nursing Nationally Ranked

Angelo State University’s Department of Nursing has been ranked as one of the “50 Best Graduate Nursing Schools in America” for 2016 by TopMastersInHealthcare.com, an online education resource guide for professional and prospective nurses, said a press release Thursday.

Overall, ASU is ranked No. 25 nationally and is the highest ranked of four Texas universities on the list. Data sources for the rankings included U.S. News and World Report and the American Association of Colleges of Nursing (AACN), and only schools certified by the AACN’s Commission on Collegiate Nursing Education (CCNE) were eligible. ASU’s nursing programs gained CCNE accreditation in June of 2015.

The TopMastersInHealthcare.com rankings were formulated by combining weighted scores in the categories of flexibility, including online, part-time and full-time options (45 percent); percentage of faculty currently working in the health care field (30 percent); and tuition and fees (25 percent).

According to the website, “ASU offers its entire graduate nursing program online through the Blackboard course delivery system. Although certain tracks require minimal in-person course attendance, even the clinical components of the degrees can usually be satisfied in students’ home cities in Texas. This makes ASU one of the premiere schools for working nurses seeking an advanced degree. Plus, with a 27-credit-hour core curriculum that features diverse classes, and with nearly half the faculty serving as active health care professionals, ASU’s online M.S.N. programs offer degrees that are as useful as they are academically rigorous.”

ASU students in the Master of Science in Nursing (M.S.N.) degree programs choose a specialization of either Family Nurse Practitioner or Nurse Educator. A collaborative M.S.N. program with Texas Tech University is also available. More details can be found at www.angelo.edu/dept/nursing/msn.php.

According to the press release, the other Texas schools to have their graduate nursing programs ranked were Prairie View A&M University, Texas A&M-Corpus Christi, Texas A&M-Texarkana and Texas Woman’s University. The entire rankings list can be found at www.topmastersinhealthcare.com/50-best-graduate-nursing-schools-in-america-2016/.

This is the second national ranking for ASU’s graduate nursing program this year, having also been ranked by U.S. News and World Report in its 2016 edition of “Best Online Programs.”