North Carolina has over one hundred nursing programs. Some programs educate licensed practical nurses (LPNs) while others educate registered nurses (RNs) and award an associate’s or bachelor’s degree. Where do these nurses go after they have graduated and how do the patterns of diffusion differ between different types of programs and individual programs?

To help answer those questions, we used licensure data to determine where a nurse completed their first nursing degree for licensure and where they were working two years later. Then we put those origin and destination points on a map for each of North Carolina’s nursing programs. We drew an ellipse around those points to show the spatial distribution of approximately 2⁄3 of the graduates from each program, giving a general idea of the diffusion pattern of a school’s graduates.

If you’d like to learn more about how to use the graduate diffusion map, you can watch the video below. Or you can just keep scrolling and dive right in.