University of Phoenix MSN programs

3girlsmom · Aug 5, 2009

I have heard wonderful things about the RN - BSN program. Those are my future plans as well. I spoke to the Nurse Practioner at Florida Medical Clinic who works with my doctor and she highly recommended it - she then went on to get her Masters at University of Tampa. She said University of Phoenix allowed her to work full time and only attend class one day a week and she graduated in 20 months. I never asked about pricing and I'm sure it's rather high tuition but she seemed to really enjoy the experience.

Phread01 · Aug 7, 2009

you can only advance your nursing degree from what you have now to something higher.

because my wife had an adn rather than a bsn going into the program, she had to take some bridge classes online (also through uop) to fill the gaps between her non-nursing bachelor’s degree and adn which she had and a bsn which would have qualified her for entrance into the msn program.

that probably sounded confusing. let me summarize.

if you have a bsn and are an rn, you can enter the rn-msn program without needing courses outside of the degree program.

if you have a bachelor’s degree not in nursing (i.e. you have a bachelor’s degree in psychology), there will be classes you need to fill the gaps between your degree and a bsn and those classes will be built into your personal degree program. they are also likely to be online courses, which cost a little more than a classroom course.

if you don't have a bachelor’s degree at all, you'll probably be told to take their rn to bsn program before beginning the msn program as they really do want you to have a bachelors before you work toward a masters.

as far as expense, uop is expensive. somewhere on the order of $500 per semester hour for the masters level programs and not much (if any) less than that for undergrad programs. the good (and eventually bad) thing about uop is that they are very adept at helping you secure student loans for their programs. which is great for getting your degree and painful for the 10 years after when you're paying off the loans.

finally, there is more than one msn program at uop. they have a core program and i think two different options to emphasize specialties that cause the degree programs to diverge. one possible specialty is education. i don't know the other option.

hope this helped.

CentralFloridaRN · Aug 8, 2009

Thank you so much. It did help. Gonna try my luck at a traditional school instead.