If you pursue a doctor's degree in nursing, you won't be alone. The field of study is the #5 most popular program in the country. This makes choosing the right school a hard decision.
College Factual looked at 3 colleges and universities when compiling its 2025 Best Nursing Doctor's Degree Schools in West Virginia ranking. When you put them all together, these colleges and universities awarded 68 doctor's degrees in nursing during the 2022-2023 academic year.
Choosing a Great Nursing School for Your Doctor's Degree
Your choice of nursing for getting your doctor's degree school matters. Important measures of a quality nursing program can vary widely even among the top schools. When choosing a school we recommend considering some of the following factors:
Quality Overall Is Important
The overall quality of a doctor's degree school is important to ensure a quality education, not just how well they do in a particular major. To make it into this list a school must rank well in our overall Best Colleges for a Doctor's Degree ranking. This ranking considered factors such as graduation rates, overall graduate earnings and other educational resources to identify great colleges and universities.
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 doctor's degree from the school. After all, your doctor's degree won't mean much if it doesn't help you find a job that will help you earn a living.
Other Factors We Consider
In addition to the above, you should consider some of the following factors:
Major Focus - How much a school focuses on nursing students vs. other majors.
Major Demand - The number of nursing students who choose to seek a doctor's degree at the school.
Educational Resources - The amount of money and other resources allocated to students while they are pursuing their degree. These resources include such things as number of students per instructor and education expenditures per student.
Student Debt - How easy is it for nursing to pay back their student loans after receiving their doctor's degree.
Accreditation - Whether a school is regionally accredited and/or accredited by a recognized nursing related body.
Our complete ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best colleges for nursing students working on their doctor'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 Doctor's Degree Schools in West Virginia list to help you make the college decision.
Best Schools for Doctorate Students to Study Nursing in West Virginia
Below you'll see a list of the best colleges and universities for pursuing a doctor's degree in nursing.
Top West Virginia Schools for a Doctorate in Nursing
Any student pursuing a degree in a doctor's degree in nursing needs to take a look at Marshall University. Located in the small city of Huntington, Marshall University is a public university with a large student population.
Doctorate graduates who receive their degree from the nursing program make an average of $213,738 in the first couple years of working.
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).