The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between the quotient problem for right noetherian nonsingular rings and the quotient problem for semicritical rings. It is shown that a right noetherian nonsingular ring R has an artinian classical quotient ring iff certain semicritical factor rings R/Ki, i = 1,…,n, possess artinian classical quotient rings and regular elements in R/Ki lift to regular elements of R for all i. If R is a two sided noetherian nonsingular ring, then the existence of an artinian classical quotient ring is equivalent to each R/Ki possessing an artinian classical quotient ring and the right Krull primes of R consisting of minimal prime ideals. If R is also weakly right ideal invariant, then the former condition is redundant. Necessary and sufficient conditions are found for a nonsingular semicritical ring to have an artinian classical quotient ring.