How We Rank Online Nutrition Programs

Each factor uses the following published thresholds.

• Completion scales the institution’s six-year graduation rate straight onto 30 points, so a 68% rate scores 20.4. Where no rate is reported the program takes 15, deliberately mid-range rather than generous or punitive.
• Cost compares tuition with the median for the page in five bands: at or under 60% of the median scores 25, to 85% scores 21, to 110% scores 16, to 160% scores 10, above that scores 5. The higher of the two published tuition figures is used, because online students are frequently billed the non-resident rate.
• Program scale takes degrees conferred against the largest program on the page, square-rooted onto 20 points. The square root is there so one very large program does not flatten everything beneath it toward zero.
• Access reads admission rate as access rather than prestige: 80% or above takes the full 15, 60% takes 13, 40% takes 10, below that 7. A program that rejects you is not useful to you.
• Public documentation is 10 points for holding the school’s own substantive page for that degree and 0 without. Every ranked program has one, so in practice this factor separates the ranked set from the 31 candidates left unranked rather than separating programs within it.

Federal distance-education records identify possible online programs. Across the 10 nutrition classifications in scope, those records flag 124 of 752 programs nationally. Because a record can describe a department rather than one degree, each candidate is checked against the school’s official page for that specific program.

Of the 124 candidate degrees checked, 62 are delivered at a distance and 31 require campus attendance.

Delivery mode is classified using three rules:

• A program is online when the school says the coursework is delivered at a distance. A distance-delivered degree may still include practice or experiential work at an approved local site; delivery mode alone says nothing about accreditation.
• A program is campus when the school says classes meet in person, lists a campus as the only location, or describes a rotation you attend on a set schedule. Hybrid counts as campus here, because somebody searching for an online degree needs to know they will be attending in person some of the time.
• Where one federal record covers several of a school’s programs and at least one is online, the record is kept and pointed at the online degree rather than thrown away.

Navigation, headers, footers and sidebars are excluded from the delivery review because they may link to a department’s other online programs without describing the degree being checked.

The 31 campus programs are published in the On Campus rankings. Each card cites the school page used to verify attendance requirements.

Program-director credentials, employer partnerships and articulation agreements could not be verified consistently across all 62 programs. These items are excluded rather than estimated. Every scored factor is calculated from data held for all programs in the ranking.

The following items are also excluded:

• No inferred accreditation. The dataset holds federal classifications, not a current program-by-program join to ACEND’s directory. Every card links to that directory, and accreditation carries no points until it can be verified as its own sourced field.
• No employment projections. The wage data here is the BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics release, which is a wage survey and contains no projections. Growth percentages you see elsewhere come from a different dataset; rather than borrow a number, this site says nothing.
• No comparisons to neighbouring programs. A card renders on a level page and a track page with different programs beside it on each, so “two ranks above” would be false on one of them. The program’s own figures are stated instead.
• No blanks. Where a figure is missing the row is not rendered at all, rather than filled with a placeholder telling you so. Where no substantive page for a degree could be found, the program is left out entirely: 31 of the 124 candidates are unranked for that reason alone.

Nutrition is not one classification family. It runs across three unrelated ones, and a site indexing only the obvious dietetics code covers about a third of the field. All 10 codes across those three families are in scope, which is why the tracks exist. Those families describe subject matter, not current accreditation or eligibility for a credentialing exam.

The ranked set is 62 programs at 51 institutions across 29 states:

• Master’s, 45 programs
• Bachelor’s, 9 programs
• Associate, 5 programs
• Doctoral, 3 programs

Two things move. Federal reporting updates annually, and schools change their own pages whenever they like. Delivery mode and tuition are the fields most likely to go stale, and because both are read from published sources, fixing them is a re-check rather than an argument.

If something here is wrong, say so and it gets fixed. A specific claim with a link to the page that contradicts it is actionable straight away; a general complaint is not. Write to help@hakia.com. The about page sets out who makes this site, how it is funded, and what it is not qualified to tell you.