Case Western charges $2,572 a credit hour for 2026-27 and closes applications on June 1 for entry the following year. The CCRN is required and one year of critical care is the stated minimum. Watch the outcomes before you apply: the Frances Payne Bolton cohort of 2025 passed the National Certification Exam at 83% on the first attempt with 25% attrition, well off what most programs in this pilot report.
Every figure on this page was read off Case Western Reserve University's own pages on 22 September 2026. Where the program publishes nothing, this page says so rather than guessing. The National Certification Exam, or NCE, is the exam every graduate has to pass, and a program that publishes its first-time pass rate is handing you the single most useful number it has.
Case Western Reserve CRNA Program: Key Facts
| Degree awarded | Doctor of Nursing Practice (DNP) |
|---|---|
| Program length | Not published — verify on the program site |
| Credits | Not published — verify on the program site |
| Start | Summer |
| Application deadline | June 1st, for entry the following year (Nurse Anesthesia DNP cycle) |
| Minimum ICU experience | 1 |
| CCRN | Required |
| GRE | Not published — verify on the program site |
| Minimum GPA | Not published — verify on the program site |
| Class / cohort size | Not published — verify on the program site |
| Format | On-campus / in-person clinical (not listed as hybrid or online; contrasts with the school's separate online 'DNP Education & Executive Leadership' track) |
| Tuition (in-state) | Not published — verify on the program site |
| Tuition (out-of-state) | Not published — verify on the program site |
| Tuition (as published) | $2,572 per credit hour (Summer 2026 / Fall 2026 / Spring 2027) — per-credit rate, not a stated program total |
| NCE first-time pass rate | 83% first-time pass rate, FPB 2025 cohort (5-year average 80%); for comparison the separately accredited Cleveland Clinic Foundation (CCF) track reports 90% first-time, CCF 2025 (5-year avg 93.3%) |
| Attrition | 25%, FPB 2025 cohort (5-year average 13%); CCF track 0%, CCF 2025 (5-year avg 2.2%) |
| Employment | 100%, FPB 2025 cohort; CCF track 95%, CCF 2025 |
Anything marked “Not published” is genuinely absent from the program's own pages. Programs are not required to publish tuition, cohort size or acceptance rate, and many do not. We would rather leave a gap than fill it with a third-party guess.
Admission Requirements
The critical-care floor is one year. That is the hard rule, and a file sitting exactly on it is eligible rather than competitive — committees read high-acuity time in a CVICU, SICU, trauma or neuro unit very differently from a monitored floor.
No GPA minimum is published for this track. Doctoral nursing programs rarely admit below a 3.0, and admitted classes usually sit well above whatever floor exists.
CCRN: Required.
GRE: not mentioned anywhere on the program's pages.
Published prerequisites
- One or more years of recent critical care experience with specialty certification (i.e. CCRN)
- One of the three application references must be from a current nurse manager or assistant nurse manager
- Three (3) recommenders (names and email addresses) — RNs in supervisory positions, professional colleagues with advanced nursing degrees, or nursing instructors preferred
- Application essay responding to 5 prompts (shift/schedule, practice strengths/weaknesses, an error-in-judgment reflection, DNP project topic)
- Resume or CV
Deadline and Timeline
Applications close June 1, for entry the following year, and the program starts in the summer.
Deadlines move year to year, and a doctoral cohort is usually decided nine to twelve months before it starts. Confirm the current cycle on the program site before you plan around this date. Our CRNA application timeline works backwards from a start date through references, shadowing, CCRN and transcripts.
Cost
$2,572 a credit hour for 2026-27. The program publishes no total and no credit count, so a full-program figure cannot be worked out from its own pages.
Tuition is not the whole number. Fees, health insurance, board-exam and licensure costs, relocation and the lost income of three years out of a staff job all land on the same ledger. Our CRNA school cost guide works through the full picture, and cheapest CRNA programs ranks by published tuition.
Outcomes
First-time NCE pass rate: 83% first-time for the 2025 Frances Payne Bolton cohort, with an 80% five-year average. The separately accredited Cleveland Clinic track reports 90%.
Attrition: 25% for the 2025 Frances Payne Bolton cohort, against a 13% five-year average
Employment: 100% for the 2025 Frances Payne Bolton cohort
These three figures are worth more than any ranking. COA requires accredited programs to publish them, and read together they tell you whether a program gets the people it admits through to a licence. National context: the first-time NCE pass rate was 90.5% in 2025 (NBCRNA), with a five-year average of 86.6%.
How Case Western Reserve Compares in Ohio
Apply in-state where you can, since residency usually moves tuition more than any other lever. See all Ohio CRNA programs, or start with these:
| Program | City | Degree | Cost | Acceptance |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Frances Payne Bolton School of Nursing (Case Western Reserve) | Cleveland | DNP | Varies | N/A |
| Lourdes University | Sylvania | DNP | Varies | N/A |
| Ohio State University | Columbus | DNP | $98,000 | 14% |
Cost and acceptance in that table are directory figures rather than program-verified ones. "Varies" and "N/A" mean the program publishes neither.
Sources and How We Verified This
Every figure above was read off Case Western Reserve University's own pages on 22 September 2026. Accreditation status and review dates come from the COA list of accredited programs. We publish no number we could not read at its source.
- https://bulletin.case.edu/nursing/programs/nursing-practice-dnp/
- https://case.edu/nursing/admissions/deadlines
- https://case.edu/nursing/admissions/how-apply/dnp
- https://case.edu/nursing/programs/dnp/dnp-nurse-anesthesia
- https://case.edu/studentaccounts/tuition-fees/graduateprofessional-tuition-fees/frances-payne-bolton-school-nursing
- https://case.edu/nursing/programs/dnp/dnp-nurse-anesthesia ; https://case.edu/nursing/admissions/how-apply/dnp
Programs change requirements and prices between admission cycles. If something here no longer matches the program site, tell us and we will fix it.