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Choosing a nursing school can be difficult. Not only do most state and private universities offer nursing degrees, but the programs in various schools can vary by quite a bit. If you want to choose a good school, then, you will need to make use of every resource at your disposal. One of the easiest ways to look for a great school is to look at rankings – the easy-to-read lists are a quick way to find out which schools are at the top of the heap, after all. Unfortunately, these lists are not always as transparent as one might hope.
Remember How Names Impact Rankings
Reputation is a huge part of the ranking process. While there are other issues considered, almost every nursing school ranking depends largely upon what others in the field think about the school. As such, a few major names will always dominate the top of the list simply because they have been on the lists in the past. These schools may be wonderful, of course, but that does not mean that they are really the best. Before you spend money applying to all of the top-ranked schools, do a bit of digging. You might find that there are better schools in your area, or that some of the top-ranked programs have begun to coast by on reputation alone. Your job as a nursing student should always be to find the best possible degree from the school that is really the best in the field.
Read the Fine Print
Nursing schools are ranked on a number of criteria, some of which may be less important to you than they are to those who compose the list. Some of the criteria used are invaluable of course – including graduating percentages and starting salaries of recent grads – but others tend to matter more to academics than nurses. You may not care what other universities think about the facilities at your school, for example, or how often your professors are published. If you see that a school in which you are interested has a lower ranking than you may have otherwise imaged, try to find out why. You might find out that the school is actually a great fit for you, even if other academics have dismissed it due to reasons that do not really concern students.
Look in Your Area
While having a “big name” university on your diploma can be helpful, your best bet for future employment is to find out where the majority of the nurses around you went to college. Networking is a huge part of getting a job, and it is often better to look for a higher ranking university around the area in which you wish to be employed than it is to look for the best overall university. There are few, if any, nursing schools that will actually leave you unprepared for your future in nursing, so your job is to find the best school that will give you the best chance of getting a job in the future.
If you must look at nursing school rankings before you apply to school, try to exercise a bit of common sense. Lists are not always accurate, and the opinions espoused by the lists are not always relevant to your needs. You are always a better judge of what school will give you the best opportunity in your area, and never let one piece of random information sway you. Do all the research that you can, and always do what you can to make sure that you make a choice that will set you up for a better career in the future.
About the Guest Author
Liz Park is a Wichita-based nurse educator and advocate of unbiased nursing school rankings, a topic she covers for Nursing School Rankings, a resource for prospective nursing school students.