The Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges recently accredited a Florida university that has ambitions plans of doubling its enrollment and enrolling more graduate students by 2025.

The school is now a level-five doctoral degree-granting institution, which means more students could earn a doctorate degree. Its first doctorate program offers health and medicine degrees.

"We offer a terminal degree in these health care professions, meaning it's the highest degree possible," the school's president said. "You can be a nurse practitioner and work in a doctor's office with a master's degree, but for a nurse practitioner to receive his or her own license and be able to practice, they must have a doctoral degree. The program gives them a lot of flexibility."

Students who earned a doctorate degree took an average of 10.1 years to complete the program, which was down from 1996, according to a 2003 survey from the National Science Foundation. The median age of recipients at that time was 33.3, it added.