Drive through any Nigerian state today and you will see the billboards:
“New School of Nursing – Admission Open”
“College of Nursing Sciences – Limited Slots”
“Start Your Nursing Career Today – Apply Now”
New nursing schools are opening faster than ever before.
Private universities, faith-based colleges, standalone academies – the list grows every month.
Fees range from ₦500,000 to ₦1.5 million per session.
Many schools admit 200–500 students per intake.
Do the simple maths and the numbers are huge.
The official reason is always the same:
“Nigeria needs more nurses to close the shortage.”
That shortage is real.
Our nurse-to-population ratio remains among the lowest in the world.
But here is the question nobody in the boardrooms wants asked out loud:
When a new nursing school opens, is the main goal to train competent nurses – or to generate steady tuition revenue?
Look at the facts:
- Nigeria inducts thousands of new nurses every year.
- Federal and state hospitals combined release fewer than 2,000 nursing vacancies in a good year.
- Private hospitals employ only a small fraction.
- Thousands of licensed nurses now wait years for placement, do locum shifts, or leave the country.
Yet new schools keep opening and collecting fees from fresh batches of students who believe a nursing certificate equals a job.
Accreditation is expensive.
Clinical sites are limited.
Qualified lecturers are scarce.
Running a proper nursing programme costs serious money.
So when a new school admits hundreds of students but the country has almost no new posts to absorb them, one honest question remains:
Is this education – or a business model dressed in white uniforms?
No one is saying every new school is bad.
Some are excellent and fill real gaps.
But when the number of graduates far outruns the number of available positions year after year, we have to ask:
Are students being sold a dream that the system cannot deliver?
A nursing licence should be a passport to meaningful work – not a expensive certificate that leads to years of job hunting.
The shortage of employed nurses in Nigeria is real.
The surplus of newly trained nurses chasing too few jobs is now just as real.
Until the jobs grow at the same speed as the schools, every new nursing institution must answer one question honestly:
Are we here to train the nurses Nigeria needs – or are we just the latest money-making venture in the health sector?
Your experience as a nurse, student or parent matters.
Drop it below – no sugar-coating.
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Fellow Nurses Africa is the independent voice of African nursing. We educate, inform and support nurses across Africa.
