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The relationship between nursing and higher education is reviewed in the light of the Project 2000 requirement that new colleges of nursing and midwifery in the United Kingdom should be linked with further and higher education. It is suggested that nursing has had a long history of being linked with higher education and that the time has come for a more decisive view to be taken of the need for the profession to move its education fully into the mainstream of higher education. Consideration of various changes in the National Health Service (NHS) in recent years indicates that educating nurses away from their professional colleagues has been detrimental to their progress in the current administrative and management organization of the NHS. Given that cyclical change occurs in nursing about every decade, it is argued that the profession should concentrate on required changes at the turn of the century. A personal prescription for change is offered as a possible way forward. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]