If you pursue a master's degree in nursing, you won't be alone. The field of study is the #2 most popular program in the country. This makes choosing the right school a hard decision.
College Factual looked at 4 colleges and universities when compiling its 2025 Best Nursing Master's Degree Schools in Iowa ranking. Combined, these schools handed out 227 master's degrees in nursing to qualified students.
Choosing a Great Nursing School for Your Master's Degree
Your choice of nursing for getting your master's degree school matters. This section explores some of the factors we include in our ranking and how much they vary depending on the school you select. When choosing a school we recommend considering some of the following factors:
Quality Overall Is Important
The overall quality of a master's degree school is important to ensure a quality education, not just how well they do in a particular major. To account for this we include a college's overall Best Colleges for a Master's Degree ranking which itself looks at a combination of different factors like degree completion, educational resources, student body caliber and post-graduation earnings for the school as a whole.
Average Earnings
To determine the overall quality of a graduate school, one factor we look at is the average early-career salary of those receiving their master's degree from the school. This is because one of the main reasons people pursue their master's degree is to enable themselves to find better-paying positions.
Other Factors We Consider
The metrics below are just some of the other metrics that we use to determine our rankings.
Major Focus - How many resources a school devotes to nursing students as compared to other majors.
Major Demand - How many other nursing students want to attend this school to pursue a master's degree.
Educational Resources - How many resources are allocated to students. These resources may include educational expenditures per student, number of students per instructor, and graduation rate among other things.
Student Debt - How much debt nursing students go into to obtain their master's degree and how well they are able to pay back that debt.
Accreditation - Whether a school is regionally accredited and/or accredited by a recognized nursing related body.
Our full ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best colleges for nursing students working on their master's degree.
When choosing the right school for you, it's important to arm yourself with all the facts you can. To that end, we've created a number of major-specific rankings, including this Best Nursing Master's Degree Schools in Iowa list to help you make the college decision.
Best Schools for Master’s Students to Study Nursing in Iowa
Below you'll see a list of the best colleges and universities for pursuing a master's degree in nursing.
Allen College is one of the best schools in the United States for getting a master's degree in nursing. Allen College is a fairly small private not-for-profit college located in the city of Waterloo.
Master's graduates who receive their degree from the nursing program make an average of $103,370 for their early career.
Graceland University - Lamoni is one of the best schools in the country for getting a master's degree in nursing. Located in the rural area of Lamoni, Graceland Lamoni is a private not-for-profit university with a small student population.
Master's recipients from the nursing degree program at Graceland University - Lamoni earn $2,633 more than the typical college graduate with the same degree shortly after graduation.
Morningside College is one of the finest schools in the country for getting a master's degree in nursing. Morningside is a small private not-for-profit college located in the city of Sioux City.
Master's graduates who receive their degree from the nursing program earn about $99,854 for their early career.
The bars on the spread charts above show the distribution of the schools on this list +/- one standard deviation from the mean.
The Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), a branch of the U.S. Department of Education (DOE) serves as the core of the rest of our data about colleges.
Some other college data, including much of the graduate earnings data, comes from the U.S. Department of Education’s (College Scorecard).