The National League for Nursing is the professional organisation for nurse educators. It is the oldest nursing organisation in the United States, founded in 1893 as the American Society of Superintendents of Training Schools for Nurses, three years before the association that became the American Nurses Association.
That origin explains its character. It was formed by the women who ran hospital training schools, at a time when nursing education was an apprenticeship controlled by hospitals, and its central concern has been the quality and standing of nursing education ever since.
What it does now
It reports about 45,000 individual members and more than 1,000 institutional members, drawn from schools of nursing, health care organisations and agencies.
Its work sits in four areas: professional development for faculty, testing and assessment products used by schools, research grants and a nursing education research centre, and public policy advocacy on the funding and capacity of nursing education.
The faculty focus makes it the organisation most directly concerned with the constraint now capping the profession's intake. Schools cannot fill teaching posts because clinical practice pays a master's-prepared nurse roughly $49,288 more, and the doctoral pipeline that would replace retiring faculty has shrunk for eleven consecutive years. See the nurse faculty shortage.
Its accrediting commission
The league accredits nursing programmes through the Commission for Nursing Education Accreditation, its own accrediting arm, which reviews programmes at every level from practical nursing through doctoral study.
This is one of three accrediting bodies a nursing programme may hold, alongside the commission attached to the American Association of Colleges of Nursing and the older commission that separated from the league itself. A prospective student's practical question is not which accreditor is best but whether the programme holds a recognised accreditation at all, because that is what makes the qualification acceptable to boards of nursing, employers and graduate schools.
Where it sits among the others
The division of labour among the three education bodies is roughly this. The league speaks for nurse faculty across all programme types, including practical nursing and associate degree programmes. The colleges association speaks for schools within universities, which means baccalaureate and graduate education. The regulators, through the boards of nursing, approve programmes as a condition of their graduates being allowed to sit the licensing examination. See the NCLEX and nurse practice acts and boards of nursing.
Those constituencies pull in different directions on the oldest argument in American nursing education, which is whether the bachelor's degree should be the requirement for entry to practice.
Related
- Nursing organizations
- The nurse faculty shortage
- American Association of Colleges of Nursing
- Levels of nursing
- The NCLEX
Sources
- About the NLN. National League for Nursing, for the 1893 founding, the original name, membership figures and the accrediting commission. Accessed September 9, 2026.
- Nursing faculty shortage fact sheet. American Association of Colleges of Nursing, for faculty vacancy and salary comparison. Accessed September 9, 2026.