What can you do with a nursing degree?
Where nursing graduates actually work, and how exposed those jobs are to AI. Built from ACS 2020-2024 5-year PUMS: 133,079 people whose bachelor's degree is in this field, aged 22-64.
Nursing is a degree that leads mainly to one clearly defined job. About 61 in 100 people with a nursing bachelor's degree work as registered nurses, and the next largest group, roughly 7 in 100, are nurse practitioners or nurse midwives. Another 3 in 100 manage medical and health services.
The rest are spread thinly across physicians, postsecondary teaching, nurse anesthetists, nursing assistants and dozens of smaller occupations, and none of those employs more than about 1 in 75 nursing graduates.
That concentration matters for the AI question. Because most nursing graduates share one occupation, the exposure of the degree is close to the exposure of that job, so our research on registered nursing carries most of the weight on this page. The figures below come from Census data on more than 133,000 people with a nursing degree, matched to the occupation pages on this site.
How exposed are nursing jobs to AI?
Registered nursing carries most of the weight here, and we rate it AI-resistant despite the paperwork. On raw task content the job looks fairly exposed: its structural score implies 62 out of 100 exposure. But state law bars delegating clinical assessment and most high-risk medication administration to unlicensed staff, and hands-on tasks such as physical assessment, IV insertion and wound care have no commercial robotic substitute in US hospitals yet.
Our confidence is medium because of one real exception: a Bronx hospital cut 12 utilization-review nurse positions in 2026 after adopting AI chart-review software, though that is insurance and chart-review work, not bedside care. Nurse practitioners, the next largest group, carry the same label.
These figures cover the 78% of nursing graduates who work in occupations we score. The other 22% work in roles we do not cover (largest: Medical and Health Services Managers; Physicians; Postsecondary Teachers). Signal 01 averages each job's own structural exposure, weighted by how many graduates work there; it describes tasks, not whether jobs will disappear.
Where nursing graduates actually work
These 7 occupations account for 76% of nursing graduates. The rest are spread across many smaller occupations, each under 1%. Graduates often work outside the field.
Careers next door to nursing, least exposed first
Curated related careers of the main occupations above, ranked by structural exposure (lowest first), so you can see which neighboring routes are less and more exposed.
What the research says about AI and nursing graduates
The Census Bureau working paper by Orr, Tucker and Warren (September 2026) found the sharpest post-ChatGPT drops in employment and earnings among the most AI-exposed tenth of majors, which it describes as dominated by computer science, information systems and related software degrees. Its appendix table rates nursing among the least AI-exposed fields, with a 2024 employment result close to the average major's, and the Dallas Fed also lists nursing among the least exposed.
The studies disagree about how much of any graduate weakness is due to AI: the Dallas Fed finds worse outcomes for exposed majors in Texas, while the NBER paper finds no spike in recent-graduate unemployment and Employ America finds no consistent link.
Read the full evidence review: what the studies say about AI and graduate jobs →
Degrees whose graduates work in similar jobs
How this page was built
Graduate shares come from the Census Bureau's American Community Survey (ACS 2020-2024 5-year PUMS), field of degree "Nursing" (code 6107), weighted to the population. Each occupation we cover is scored with the numbers already published on its own page on this site, then averaged by graduate share. Occupations without a page are shown but never scored. Graduates aged 22-64 are included, so the mix reflects the whole working-age group, not only recent graduates. Sources: www2.census.gov, www.bls.gov. This page is general information, not career or educational advice.