How We Rank DHSc Programs

Every score on this site comes from the seven inputs below and nothing else. The weights are published, the sources are named, and you can rebuild any number on the site from them.

Which DHSc Degree Programs Get Listed at All

This is the decision that shapes the site more than the scoring does. The federal data files the DHSc under general health sciences codes that also contain PhDs, clinical doctorates and research degrees with nothing to do with this credential. Counting those codes gives you 43 doctorates. Most of them are not a DHSc.

So the test is not the federal code. A program is listed here when the university's own page calls the degree a Doctor of Health Science, in those words or as DHSc or D.H.Sc. We crawled each school's own website to find that page, and every program card links to the page it was read from. That test currently yields 24 programs. It is a stricter test than other lists use, and it is why this one is shorter.

The cost of that strictness is that a program can be missing because its website defeated the crawler rather than because it does not exist. If you know of a DHSc that belongs here, the contact address is on the about page.

How Complete Is This List of DHSc Degree Programs?

Treat it as a floor, not a census, and here is exactly why. Nobody publishes an authoritative count of DHSc programs. The degree has no programmatic accreditor, so there is no official directory to check against, and the federal data files it under general health-sciences codes shared with PhDs and clinical doctorates, so counting those codes gives you a number that is far too high and full of the wrong degrees.

What we do instead is scan every institution in the country that reports a health-professions doctorate, 709 of them, by loading each school's own program listing in a real browser and reading it. A browser is the part that matters: several universities publish their entire degree catalogue as a JavaScript application, and Nova Southeastern's DHSc, one of the largest in the country, is invisible to anything that only reads the raw HTML.

That scan will still miss programs, in two specific ways worth naming. A school can bury the degree behind a search box, name it something the scan does not recognise, or sit behind bot protection that refuses an automated browser.

The second gap is narrower and more interesting. The list of institutions to scan is built from federal completions data, which counts degrees actually conferred, so a school appears only once it has graduated somebody from a health-professions doctorate. A brand-new DHSc at a university with no other health doctorate would therefore not be on the list to scan at all. A new DHSc at a school that already runs a physical therapy or nursing doctorate is caught, because the scan reads that school's live website rather than its federal filings.

So this list grows as we verify more, and it will never carry a program we have not read the school's own page for. A short list we can stand behind is worth more than a long one we cannot.

The Seven Factors in the DHSc Degree Program Score

Credits to Degree 25%

Between the shortest and longest program on this site there is a 34 credit gap for the same three letters. Nothing else in this model moves what the degree costs you as much, because credits set both the tuition bill and the number of terms you are enrolled. Fewer credits scores higher.

Published Graduate Tuition 20%

This is an institutional rate, not the price of the DHSc, and the difference is not small. It is used because it is the only cost figure defined identically for every school here. We do not multiply it by the length of the degree and publish the product as a program price: that number would look precise and would be wrong for every part-time student, which is most of them.

Time to Degree 15%

Taken from the school's own page, and taken at the low end, because that is the number they market. Almost every program here assumes you are working while you study, so the published figure usually already describes a part-time pace.

Capstone Burden 12%

An applied project scores higher. This is a judgement about fit, not about quality: a dissertation is a bigger commitment and the reader this site is written for is fitting a doctorate around a job. If you want the research training, invert this column. It is published for exactly that reason.

Online Without Residency 12%

A program marketed as online that requires you to fly somewhere twice is charging you a cost that never appears in its tuition table. Fully online scores highest, online with a residency scores in the middle, on campus scores lowest.

Institutional Completion Rate 10%

A weak proxy, weighted accordingly. It measures the whole institution, mostly undergraduates, not this doctorate. It is included because completion is the risk that matters most in a doctoral program and there is no DHSc-specific completion figure published anywhere.

Published What a Buyer Needs 6%

The smallest weight on the list, because it measures the website rather than the education. It is here because a program that hides its credit count is imposing a real cost on you, and because it is the only input on this page a school could fix tomorrow.

How Missing DHSc Program Data Is Handled

A factor with no published figure scores at the median of the programs that do publish one, not at zero. Zeroing an absence would rank the transparent below the opaque, which is exactly backwards: a school is not offering a worse degree because it has a worse website. The one place transparency does count is its own 6% factor, where it is measured openly instead of leaking into the other six.

How the DHSc Degree Program Score Is Plotted

The weighted result is converted to a percentile within the list and then curved as 50 plus half the percentile, so scores run from 50 to 100 and 50 is a hard floor. Last place scoring 50 rather than 3 is deliberate. Every program here is an accredited doctorate from an accredited university, and a single-digit score would be a claim about quality that this data cannot support.

What This DHSc Ranking Model Does Not Measure

No reputation survey feeds the score. No editor moves a program up or down. Advertising is not an input: an advertiser buys a labelled placement, never a rank, and every program is scored the same way whether or not there is a commercial relationship.

The model also cannot see the things that most decide whether your own DHSc goes well. It does not know which faculty member would chair your project, whether your employer will pay, or whether the cohort you land in will still be there in year three. It measures the published shape of the degree. That is a real thing to compare, and it is not the same as quality.

Accreditation, and Why There Is No DHSc Accreditation Column

No accreditor accredits the DHSc. CAHME accredits healthcare management degrees, CEPH accredits public health degrees, CCNE and ACEN accredit nursing degrees, and none of them covers this one. Every program on this site is covered only by its university's institutional accreditor, which is a genuine but much weaker guarantee, and it is the same guarantee for all of them. A column where every row says the same thing would be decoration, so there is not one. This paragraph is here instead, because you should know that before spending three years and a lot of money.

Sources for the DHSc Degree Program Data

• Program facts: each university's own program page, linked from every card.
• Institutional tuition, completion rates and degrees conferred: IPEDS Completions and Institutional Characteristics.
• Wage figures: BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics.