Nursing Education: Shaping Practitioners, Academics, or Civilisation?
REPUBLIKA.CO.ID, Indonesia has succeeded in producing doctors and nursing specialists, but has not yet succeeded in providing them with decent places within the national health system. That sentence may sound harsh, but it is the greatest irony of Indonesian nursing education today.
Amidst commemorating ‘International Nurses Day, 12 May 2026’ and the emerging discourse on closing study programmes and the unclear grand design of long-term national higher education, a fundamental question arises: what is higher education actually for? Is it merely to produce labour? To train practitioners? To form academics? Or to build human civilisation?
That question becomes highly relevant when looking at the development of nursing education in Indonesia. In recent decades, nursing education has undergone a major transformation: from Nursing Education Schools (SPK), developing into Nursing Academies (AKPER), then entering the higher education system through bachelor’s, professional, master’s, specialist, and doctoral levels.
Academically, this is a major advancement. However, substantively, an unresolved paradox emerges: the increase in education levels has not been fully accompanied by improvements in welfare, social recognition, or strengthening of the nursing profession’s strategic position in the national health system.
The state encourages the birth of master’s, specialist, and even doctoral nursing education. However, at the same time, the health service system has not fully provided professional space, remuneration, and equivalent clinical authority. Education moves forward, but professional governance lags behind. As a result, intellectual frustration arises among nursing personnel: degrees increase, but professional recognition remains stagnant.
Higher Education that Has Lost Orientation
So far, the discourse on higher education in Indonesia has too often been reduced to the issue of ‘link and match’ with the world of work. The measure of university success is narrowed to graduate absorption rates, waiting time for employment, and industry relevance.
Such an approach is indeed important economically. However, when higher education is only positioned as a labour factory, scientific knowledge loses its civilisational spirit.
Nursing is a real example. The nursing profession does not exist merely to meet the needs of the health workforce market. Nursing is essentially a humanistic discipline based on caring, ethics, empathy, spirituality, and respect for human dignity.
Nurses are present not only to perform clinical actions, but also to accompany humans at their most vulnerable points in life: illness, suffering, even death. Therefore, if nursing education is only measured by ‘how quickly graduates work’, then this nation is simplifying a humanistic profession into mere health service operators.