How we count nursing schools

The unit

A nursing school is one provider at one site that holds at least one program whose graduates may register for the first time as a nurse. Rows from every source collapse to that pair. A chain with one website and twenty campuses is twenty schools, because a board approves each campus on its own and can close one without the others.

The federal record is the identity of record. A school’s key is its IPEDS unit id, so two rows join only when they carry the same id, never because their names look alike. A board or accreditor row attaches to a federal record only on a name key that is unique among that state’s nursing schools; an ambiguous row is published exactly as the board printed it, under listed only by the state board. It has no coordinates of its own, so the map draws it as a hollow ring at the city the board prints, grouped with the other board-listed programs there; a ring is a city, never a campus. A row whose city is missing, or whose city name occurs twice in its state, gets no mark.

The boundary

A provider that trains only nursing assistants (CIP 51.3902) is recorded and is not a nursing school; regulators and the federal survey file the two together, which is why the exclusion has to be stated. A program on the books with no graduates in the survey year still counts and says so on its page. A college with no nursing awards that a state board approves counts on the board’s word.

States a fact can be in

Approval has five values: approved, provisional, conditional, withdrawn, and unknown. Provisional is separate from conditional on purpose. A board that grants a new program initial approval has approved it, and filing that program beside one the board put on probation would state a problem the board never stated. Unknown is the state of every program no board lane has reached, and it is never shown as “not approved”. When a board’s table prints no status column, the page says so rather than leaving a blank that reads as a finding. An approval older than eighteen months is still shown, with its date.

These pages print the board’s own words in the approval column and never the mapped value, so a reader always sees what the board published. The mapping to the five values is a closed list: a status string nobody has read before resolves to unknown rather than to a guess.

Membership has three values: listed, when an official lane shows an entry program; candidate, when only the school itself says so; and out of scope, when every program on record is known and none leads to first registration.

Board coverage, per state, has five values, so an unread board can never look like a state with no programs:

• Read in full The board’s approved-program list and its NCLEX table were both read.
• Read in part Part of the board’s published lists was read; each list read is named under Sources on the state page.
• Board site blocks reads The board’s site refused automated reads; no board rows are shown.
• Board publishes no list The board does not publish an approved-program list online.
• Not yet read The board’s list has not been read yet.