The DNP is the nation’s fastest-growing graduate nursing program. Fifteen years ago, there were about 6,600 American DNP students, but by 2024,

there were nearly seven times that number: 42,767.

UVA’s DNP welcomed 28 students in 2007, the year it was accredited, and its first graduate was assistant professor Amy Boitnott (DNP ’08). Seventeen years later, accreditors approved UVA’s new DNP structure, and its first cohort of students, 118-members strong, arrived last August. Gone was the four-year, full-time “two-plus-two” structure, which offered students an MSN specialty along their path to the clinical doctorate and in-person classes three to four times each week; in came a new three-year hybrid program, in-person class about six times each semester, and students’ ability to complete the rest of their courses through synchronous and asynchronous online learning. 

Not only the new DNP cohort a larger-than-usual group, the program they began is materially different. These graduate students—the majority of whom work full- or part-time—will earn 750 hours of mentored clinical experience across program, choose one of seven nursing specialty areas on which to focus—becoming neonatal nurse practitioners to family and psych-mental health NPs—and get ample preparation and practice to successfully pass the certification exam of their choice. 

As nursing organizations from the American Association of Colleges of Nursing to the Nursing Organization for Nurse Practitioner Faculty now endorse the DNP, rather than the MSN, as the educational destination for advanced practice nurses, it’s become a moment for a degree that once mocked as “the doctor-nurse program.”

A look at UVA’s new hybrid Doctor of Nursing Practice program, BY THE NUMBERS.