Stony Brook University online nursing program ranked in top 10 by U.S. News

For the second year in a row, the Stony Brook University School of Nursing’s Online Master’s Program was ranked in the top 10 schools nationwide by the U.S. News and World Report in its 2021 College Rankings.

The program has remained in the top 20 for online graduate nursing programs in all but one of the past eight years. In 2020, the program was ranked 7th and in 2021 ranked 9th in the list of Best Online Master’s in Nursing Programs. Officials at the school say the change in ranking from last year to this year may be due to the slight decline in faculty numbers because additional hiring remained difficult due to the pandemic.

The School of Nursing began offering online education in 1994. It started with a Midwifery program and developed into an array of other nurse practitioner education programs. This led to more than 25 years of developing and refining innovative online programs to provide a firm foundation of new online learning applications for nurses and future nurses.

“Our longstanding experience became critical to continued success with online learning this past year in responding to the health care needs and educational changes during the pandemic,” says Annette Wysocki, PhD, RN, FAAN, Dean of the School of Nursing. “Our constant attention to content and presentation methods provides students with visual, graphic and other ways to access content, and this even includes active engagement with simulated clinical experiences within online educational platforms.”

According to U.S. News, online graduate nursing data used as methodology to calculate the rankings included five areas of data: engagement (30 percent); expert opinion (20 percent); faculty credentialing and training (20 percent); services and technologies (20 percent); and student excellence (10 percent).

For more details about the methodology, see this link.