Nursing school and rankings

**NICU Guy, BSN, RN** · Mar 5, 2020

Not another one of these "Should I go to a Top Tier/ Prestigious/ High ranked nursing school. Here are two to get you started. This topic is brought up frequently.

In my opinion, "ranked" nursing schools are not worth it if you need to relocate to attend. If you plan on staying locally, the reputation of the schools in your area is most important. If your local CC graduates high quality graduates and your local university produces average graduates, the hiring managers will choose the CC graduates. Unless you plan to attend Grad school, the school you got your BSN from is irrelevant. Hiring managers do not care what school you graduated from except if the school has a bad reputation. Once you get several years experience and you are looking to relocate, experience is the only thing the new hospital cares about.

As for the "rankings", excluding law, business, medical school, the rankings are a PR tool for the school. You may have a very high quality nursing school who would place high on the list but doesn't choose to spend the money and man hours to gather all the data and submit all the paperwork to the ranking publication. They would be considered unranked even though they would have been highly ranked if they wanted to.