UCSF Pediatric Nurse Practitioner Programs

The University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) School of Nursing offers one pediatric nurse practitioner pathway:

BSN Entry to DNP –(ACPNP) – Acute Care (CPNP-AC)

The pathway is full-time, starts only in fall, and runs 11 consecutive quarters. Applicants must already hold a California RN license and two years of clinical practice in an acute pediatric setting. All clinical training happens at sites in the San Francisco Bay Area, and applicants who need an F-1 visa are not eligible.

Program Tracks Overview

Program	Est. Tuition & Fees (Resident / Non-Resident)	Est. Duration	Credit Hours
DNP – AC	$172K / $208K	3 yrs (11 quarters)	Not published

Tuition estimates apply UCSF’s published 2026-27 School of Nursing quarterly rates for the Post-BSN DNP across 11 quarters: one year billed at the new-student rate and two at the continuing-student rate, which adds a summer quarter. Totals include the mandatory student health insurance premium, which students with comparable coverage can waive.

Why choose it: The only acute care PNP specialty at a California public university, with every clinical placement arranged at partners including UCSF Health and Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital.
Trade-off: Requires two years of acute pediatric RN experience and a California RN license, with three years of full-time study and Bay Area clinical sites only.

Quick Facts

Program Types	BSN Entry to DNP, one pediatric specialty
Population Focus	Acute Care only (CPNP-AC). No primary care pediatric track
Format	Hybrid. In-person and online didactic courses plus Bay Area clinical training
Campus Attendance	Minimal in fall of year one; more days in winter, spring, and summer; years two and three mostly in person
Length	11 quarters across three continuous years, full-time
Start Terms	Fall only, one intake per year
Clinical Hours	Not published for the current curriculum
Clinical Placement	Arranged by UCSF’s Office of Clinical Placements; students do not find their own sites or preceptors
Clinical Locations	San Francisco Bay Area
RN License Required	California RN license; out-of-state applicants must license by endorsement before starting
RN Experience Required	Two years of clinical practice in an acute pediatric setting
Est. Tuition & Fees	About $171,700 resident, $208,400 non-resident for the full pathway
Accreditation	CCNE. Pathway under review by the California Board of Registered Nursing

BSN Entry to DNP – Acute Care Pediatric Nurse Practitioner

The Acute Care Pediatric Nurse Practitioner specialty sits inside UCSF’s BSN Entry to DNP – Advanced Nursing Focus pathway, so students earn the doctorate and the NP specialty preparation in a single 11-quarter sequence. Estimated tuition and fees come to roughly $171,700 for California residents and $208,400 for non-residents at current rates. The program takes three continuous years of full-time study, with quarters separated by one- or two-week breaks. It prepares graduates for the PNCB acute care exam (CPNP-AC), and the eligibility question that decides most applications is prior experience: two years of clinical practice in an acute pediatric setting, which UCSF requires before a student begins clinical rotations.

UCSF does not publish a total credit requirement or a clinical hour total for this specialty. The school publishes a year-one sample plan of study and routes current students to a login-protected wiki for the full curriculum. The figures below are what UCSF makes public as of this writing.

ACPNP Curriculum

UCSF rebuilt this pathway around a shared doctoral core. Year one is the same for every specialty in the BSN Entry to DNP: leadership, policy, scholarship, quality improvement, and the advanced practice science courses, with specialty content appearing in spring and summer as unnamed “APRN Specialty Content” blocks. That structure means the pediatric acute care coursework, the procedural and critical care content, and the inpatient management sequence are not described anywhere in the public plan of study. Applicants can see year one in detail and years two and three not at all.

The published year-one sample totals 39 units across four quarters:

Fall, quarter 1 (8 units): BSN-DNP Prologue (2); Concepts and Contemporary Issues for Advanced Practice (3); Racism, Health Care and Social Justice (2); Principles of Genomics for the Advanced Practice Provider (1)
Winter, quarter 2 (10 units): Advanced Health Policy and Advocacy Across Diverse Populations (3); Foundation in Nursing Scholarship for the Nurse Leader (3); Principles of Clinical Prevention and Population Health for Evidence-Based Practice (3); Interprofessional Education (1)
Spring, quarter 3 (10 units): Advanced Health Assessment Concepts (2); Advanced Physiology and Pathophysiology Concepts (2); Advanced Pharmacologic Concepts (3); Advanced Practice Skills Lab (1); APRN Specialty Content (2)
Summer, quarter 4 (11 units): Improving Health Outcomes by Advancing QI and Safety Initiatives (3); APRN Specialty Content (3); APRN Specialty Content (3); APRN Specialty Clinical/Residency Application (2)

Two features of the sequence matter in practice. The advanced practice science courses, assessment, physiology and pathophysiology, and pharmacology, do not arrive until spring of year one, later than at many NP programs, which front-load them. And the DNP evidence-based quality improvement project is not a capstone bolted on at the end: UCSF tells students to start thinking about a topic in year one, enrolls them in project courses beginning in quarter 8, and says most students complete the project at their own workplace. If an employer will not support the project, faculty try to find another site.

See UCSF’s published year-one sample curriculum.

ACPNP Clinical Requirements

Total clinical hours: not published for the current curriculum
Placement responsibility: UCSF’s Office of Clinical Placements arranges every site and handles site-specific onboarding requirements
Geography: all clinical training takes place in the San Francisco Bay Area
Named clinical partners include UCSF Health, Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital, Stanford Health Care, Kaiser Northern California, Sutter Health, Alameda Health Systems, Dignity Health, John Muir Health, SFDPH/ZSFGH, Contra Costa Behavioral Health, and Veterans Affairs
Load: clinical training is limited in fall of year one and becomes the majority of the student’s time in years two and three
Prerequisite: two years of acute pediatric practice must be complete before clinical rotations begin

Arranged placement is the single most valuable thing on this list. At most NP programs the student spends months cold-calling clinics for preceptors, and a failed search delays graduation. UCSF removes that task entirely, and it does so in a market where pediatric acute care preceptors are scarce. The named partners are the reason it works: UCSF and Lucile Packard are two of the region’s referral children’s hospitals, which is where acute care pediatric rotations have to happen.

The cost of that arrangement is geography. Placements are assigned, not chosen, and they sit anywhere across a nine-county region, so a student may commute well outside their own city for a full quarter. Anyone who cannot relocate to or commute within the Bay Area for three years should stop here. Applicants should also note that UCSF does not publish a clinical hour total for the redesigned curriculum. National certification requires a minimum of 500 supervised clinical hours, and acute care pediatric programs typically sit in the 600 to 750 range. UCSF does not publish where this program sits against either benchmark.

ACPNP Admissions

BSN from an accredited institution, or an MSN, documented by official transcript. An MSN alongside a bachelor’s degree in another field is also accepted
Minimum 3.0 GPA
California RN license. Applicants licensed elsewhere must obtain California licensure by endorsement before starting
Two years of clinical practice in an acute pediatric setting, required before clinical rotations begin
Three letters of recommendation: one from a current or recent employer or supervisor, one from a faculty member who can assess academic work (replaceable with a second supervisor letter), and one from a non-relative familiar with the applicant’s professional preparation
Goal statement, 500 words maximum, PDF. UCSF prohibits the use of AI tools in writing it
Personal statement covering background and its influence on pursuing graduate study
Résumé or CV, two to five pages, PDF
No GRE. No statistics prerequisite for fall 2027 entry or later
Application fee $120 for U.S. citizens and permanent residents, $140 for international applicants, with need-based waivers available
English proficiency for international applicants: TOEFL 92 iBT, with minimums of 24 in speaking and writing, or IELTS 7.0
Fall 2027 cycle: applications open Sept. 15, 2026, deadline Feb. 14, 2027, decisions March or April 2027, classes begin September 2027
Admitted applicants have two weeks to accept. Deferrals are rarely granted and requests are due by June 30

Three rules here can cost an applicant a year. First, the experience gate is absolute and specific: two years in acute pediatrics, not two years of general pediatrics and not two years of adult ICU. UCSF directs candidates who are unsure to confirm with the specialty coordinator before applying. Second, the specialty is chosen at application and locked after admission, so a student admitted to ACPNP cannot switch to another NP population later. Third, UCSF states that specialties may close admissions before the published deadline once seats are filled, which makes a February 14 submission a genuine risk rather than a safe plan.

The published admission statistics are worth reading carefully before assuming this is a long shot. Across the whole BSN Entry to DNP pathway, UCSF reports 107 applicants and 100 admits for 2025 entry, and 114 applicants and 84 admits for 2024. Those are pathway-wide figures covering six specialties, not ACPNP alone, and UCSF does not publish specialty-level numbers. The pattern they suggest is that the filtering happens upstream: the two-year acute pediatric requirement, the California license, and the Bay Area commitment thin the applicant pool long before faculty review it.

Tuition

UCSF does not charge this program by the credit. The Post-BSN DNP is billed at flat quarterly rates set by the UC Regents, and for 2026-27 the School of Nursing publishes two schedules: a new-student rate covering fall, winter, and spring, and a continuing-student rate that adds a summer quarter. Resident totals come to $52,306 for the new-student year and $59,675 for each continuing year; non-resident totals are $64,551 and $71,920. Non-resident supplemental tuition adds $12,245 a year and, unlike the PhD programs, carries no published phase-out for this pathway.

Pathway	Est. Resident	Est. Non-Resident
BSN Entry to DNP – ACPNP (11 quarters)	$171,656	$208,391
Same, with health insurance waived	$130,484	$167,219

Calculated from UCSF’s published 2026-27 quarterly rates held flat across three years. These are not university-published program totals.

Key Cost Takeaways

The health insurance premium is the biggest single lever a student controls. It accounts for $41,172 of the three-year total and can be waived with comparable coverage, which for a working nurse on an employer plan is the difference between roughly $172,000 and $130,000 in state.
Professional Degree Supplemental Tuition drives the price, not tuition. Standard graduate tuition is $13,722 a year; the supplemental charge adds $24,792 on top of it. That is why a public university lands near private-school totals.
UC employees get a substantial reduction. Regular-status UC employees in eligible titles receive a two-thirds reduction in the Student Services Fee and tuition for up to 12 units or four courses per quarter. UCSF does not state that the reduction covers the supplemental tuition, which is the largest line, so a Benioff or UCSF Health nurse should confirm the scope before budgeting on it.
The published end date for that employee benefit conflicts across UCSF’s own pages. The program overview page says it runs through spring 2031; the pathway FAQ says spring 2026. The overview page carries the later revision date and is used here.
Rates move every year, and recently by a lot. The four-quarter resident total rose from $53,719 in 2025-26 to $59,675 in 2026-27, an 11 percent jump. A three-year estimate built on today’s rates is a floor, not a ceiling.
Working through the program is limited by design. UCSF recommends that students not work more than 60 percent of full time during the academic year, so the usual strategy of staying at full-time RN pay while studying does not apply here.

Against other California pediatric NP programs, UCSF is the expensive option even at resident rates, and the gap is structural rather than incidental: the state funds the campus, but the professional degree supplement prices the doctorate close to what private universities charge. What a student buys with that premium is arranged placement at referral children’s hospitals and a doctorate rather than a master’s. Whether that is worth roughly $130,000 to $172,000 depends heavily on whether the insurance waiver and any employee reduction apply.

See UCSF’s current School of Nursing fee schedule.

Why Choose This PNP Program?

Best suited for: an experienced Bay Area PICU, pediatric ED, or inpatient pediatric nurse who wants the CPNP-AC credential and the DNP in one three-year run, and who would rather have placements assigned than spend a year hunting for preceptors.

The only public-university acute care pediatric NP program in California

Acute care pediatrics is a thin field nationally, and California has very few seats. UCSF states its ACPNP specialty is the only one of its kind at a public university in the state, which means a California nurse who wants to manage critically ill children as an NP has a short list of options and a long wait between intakes. For nurses already working in a Bay Area PICU or pediatric ED, this is the program that matches the work they already do.

Placements are arranged, at hospitals that actually take acute care students

UCSF’s Office of Clinical Placements arranges every rotation and handles the site paperwork. That alone eliminates the most common cause of delayed graduation in NP education. The partner list matters as much as the policy: acute care pediatric rotations need a children’s hospital, and UCSF names both its own system and Lucile Packard among its sites. Programs that leave students to self-source frequently cannot deliver a PICU rotation at all.

What UCSF publishes about outcomes

UCSF reports national certification pass rates of 87 percent overall and 88 percent for first-time takers in 2024, with similar results in 2022 and 2023. Of the class surveyed for 2023-24, 93 percent were employed, 90 percent in California, and 79 percent as advanced practice nurses. Read these as school-level indicators rather than specialty-level ones: they cover graduates of the master’s program across all specialties, and UCSF does not break certification results out by population focus or report them for the newer DNP pathway.

Potential Drawbacks

Two years of acute pediatric practice is a hard prerequisite. There is no route in for a nurse with a general pediatric or adult critical care background
No primary care pediatric option. Graduates are eligible for CPNP-AC only
A California RN license is required to apply, and all clinicals are Bay Area based, which rules out out-of-state and most non-Bay Area California students
Full-time design with in-person days that increase after year one, plus a recommendation to work no more than 60 percent
One intake a year, and the specialty can close before the February deadline
Neither the total credit requirement nor the clinical hour total is published for the current curriculum, and years two and three of the plan of study are not public
Among the most expensive pediatric NP options in California, even at resident rates
Applicants requiring an F-1 visa are not eligible

The Verdict

UCSF is the clearest choice in California for one specific nurse: someone with two or more years in a pediatric ICU, pediatric ED, or inpatient pediatric unit, licensed in California, living within commuting distance of the Bay Area, and able to go full-time for three years. That nurse gets a scarce acute care credential, a doctorate, arranged rotations at referral children’s hospitals, and a cohort that moves through together. Everyone else should look elsewhere, and the reasons are mostly structural rather than qualitative. Nurses who want pediatric primary care, who need to stay in another state, who cannot meet the experience requirement, or who need to keep working full-time will not fit this program regardless of how strong their application is. Cost is the remaining question even for good-fit candidates: the sticker is high for a public university, and the practical total depends on whether a student can waive the health insurance premium and whether a UC employment reduction applies.

Accreditation

The UCSF Doctor of Nursing Practice program is accredited by the Commission on Collegiate Nursing Education (CCNE). The BSN Entry to DNP, Advanced Practice pathway is one track within that program and is currently under review by the California Board of Registered Nursing. UCSF does not publish an expected completion date for the review, and continues to state that graduates are eligible for California BRN nurse practitioner certification.

UCSF states that ACPNP graduates are eligible for the California BRN Nurse Practitioner certificate and Furnishing certificate, a national DEA registration, and the Certified Pediatric Nurse Practitioner – Acute Care (CPNP-AC) examination offered by the Pediatric Nursing Certification Board. Because the program prepares acute care only, graduates are not eligible for the primary care pediatric credential.

Compare UCSF to Other California PNP Programs

Azusa Pacific University - Azusa
Loma Linda University - Loma Linda

What’s the best California Pediatric Nursing program for you?