The commodification of nursing education: A discursive paper on academic identity, faculty work, and the future of nursing knowledge.
Abstract
Background
The nursing and midwifery educator workforce is increasingly seen as key to sustaining healthcare, driving professional education, and shaping nursing knowledge. However, debates often focus mainly on numbers, such as shortages, recruitment, and expanding capacity. Less attention is given to the institutional and epistemic factors impacting academic nursing work.
Aims
To critically examine how commodifying nursing education affects academic identity, faculty work, educator sustainability, professional formation, and the future of nursing knowledge.
Design
Discursive paper.
Methods
This discursive paper draws on literature about neoliberal higher education, commodification, academic identity, student consumerism, faculty workload, nurse educator sustainability, and nursing knowledge. Through critical synthesis, it examines how market reforms, performance metrics, managerial control, teaching-heavy contracts, and student-consumer expectations reshape nursing education.
Results
The discursive analysis shows that commodification recasts students as consumers, curricula as products, faculty as service providers, and nursing knowledge as measurable outputs. These shifts narrow nurse educator identity and increase both visible and invisible labour. They also weaken scholarly capacity and reduce professional formation to technical skills, satisfaction metrics, and workforce output. The paper contends that the educator workforce crisis is more than a shortage; it is also an ideological, institutional, and epistemic crisis.
Conclusion
Nursing education should be reclaimed as a public, professional, and epistemic good. Protecting its future requires more than hiring educators; it demands transforming academic environments so nurse educators can fully teach, mentor, research, lead, critique, and sustain the profession's knowledge and traditions.