When Steve Beard took on the role of CEO at higher education firm Adtalem Global Education in 2021, the company was undergoing a significant strategic shift. It had identified gaps in the health-care workforce pipeline, which were expected to grow. That led Adtalem to exit its other education business units and focus solely on health-care education.
In that moment, Beard said the company could have changed its name, allowing it to “claim a different positioning.” However, as it looked at the increasingly fragile health-care workforce, it wanted to ensure it was a critical part of solving that problem before it planted a new flag.
Last week, Adtalem announced it would be changing its name to Covista, which Beard said reflects what the company has done so far, but also what it sees ahead.
“97,000 students, 385,000 alumni, and 24,000 health-care students graduated every year,” Beard said. “We’re only getting started; there’s a tremendous opportunity to continue to extend this platform, to grow the scale of these institutions, to bring even more day-one-ready talent to U.S. health care, but also to have a more definitive voice in the role that plays in care delivery in the U.S.”
Those student numbers position Covista as a critical player on the health-care landscape in the U.S. The 24,000 health-care professionals that graduate every year from its schools is more than any institution and represents roughly 10% of America’s nurses. Covista also educates twice as many MDs as any MD-granting school in the U.S. and is the No. 1 provider of doctors of veterinary medicine to the U.S., according to its data.
Covista’s health-care ambitions
Beard said the company worked through several ideas of how a new name could help tell the story. “I’m not a marketer by training, I don’t come out of a creative background, so it was fascinating to watch the naming process come together,” said Beard, adding that discussions varied from the science of using real words versus made-up words, the ways that certain consonants and vowels create an emotional response when spoken, and how different words would be interpreted by different languages and cultures.
With Covista, Beard said the made-up word suggests two things: Co, implying the idea of community and sharing, and vista, “the idea of creating a shared vision for the future around health care and around access to these careers for folks who have historically been locked out of them.”
But there was a message from naming advisors that Beard said stuck out to him. “[They] continued to remind us every step along the way that a brand is only as important as what’s inside it,” he said. “It’s a promise, and it’s only as valuable as to the extent to which folks believe that promise has been delivered.”
A name change isn’t entirely new ground for the broader organization. In 2017, DeVry Education Group changed its name to Adtalem Global Education to “represent all institutions in the group,” according to a SEC filing. At the time, the company’s business came from three different education focuses: medical and health care, professional education, and technology and business. That name change also came several months after Adtalem settled lawsuits with both the FTC and the Education Department over charges related to DeVry’s post-graduate job and salary claims. Adtalem sold DeVry in 2018.
The schools that make up Covista won’t be changing their names, but Beard said this renaming moment will allow them to “connect to a vision at the enterprise level that’s just much broader and much bigger” than what each school could aspire to on its own.
“It’s about setting the aspiration even higher than it’s ever been, giving our folks the permission to think bigger about what they can accomplish individually, and to think bigger about what we can accomplish collectively,” Beard said.
Dealing with major job market challenges
That includes Covista playing a leading role in some of the challenges the health-care industry is facing. Last year, the company announced a partnership with Google Cloud to launch an AI credentials program designed to teach health-care students and practicing clinicians how to best use the technology in their roles. Covista also launched a new impact program aimed to build and sustain the health-care workforce, including working with partners to promote health-care career exploration and expand mental health and wellbeing support for health-care workers.
In the latest nonfarm payroll report from the Labor Department covering the national jobs market, health-care positions again led gains among sectors. Beard said as he looks out at the health-care landscape, the opportunities for Covista have him excited.
“I remain optimistic about it, if for no other reason than acknowledging that the demographic trends in American society are such that we’re going to have to rely more and more on the health-care system,” Beard said. “We’ve got an aging population, we’ve got many more people that need to rely on this system for care and quality of life, and that creates the kind of necessity around innovation.”
However, the scarcity of the clinical workforce and the implications on quality of care are challenges that are only growing more acute within health care.
There are more than 8.4 million open health-care jobs in the U.S., Covista data suggests, representing more than two job openings for every unemployed health-care worker. That is putting added stress on the system and the workers within it: 73% of health-care executives and 76% of clinicians say staffing shortages compromise the quality of care they can provide, according to a Covista poll fielded by Gallup of more than 1,300 clinicians and 160 health-care executives.
The survey was conducted as part of its rebrand, and Beard said it highlights that this is not just a staffing issue, but a patient care crisis.
“We’ve talked a lot about the chronic workforce challenges, the asymmetry between supply and demand,” he said. “What does it mean for the quality of care? What does it mean for satisfaction amongst clinical professionals, how they feel about their career, and their intention to stay in those careers? What do people think about the role of technology in solving this challenge?”
Not surprisingly, Beard said the data suggests that while those shortages are impacting health-care providers across the country, the problem is particularly vexing in rural communities. It also varies by medical discipline, with roles like radiation therapists and cardiovascular technicians being particularly difficult to fill.
Covista has tried to help solve some of those issues through partnerships between its institutions and employers, which provide tuition support and clinical training opportunities for students, who in return, commit to joining the employer’s workforce after graduation. One such program, between Chamberlin University and Midwest health system SSM Health, is projected to produce more than 400 new nurses annually.
“We think that model, which we intend to replicate in other markets where we can actually manufacture new demand for entry into these professions, is one way we get after some of these chronic workforce shortages where they’re most acute,” Beard said.
However, there have been some challenges to the for-profit college industry that could impact the number of students who enter these programs. As part of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, the Trump administration put limits on federal student loans for graduate degrees. It also removed nursing degrees from the professional degree designation, meaning it will have a $100,000 total borrowing limit compared to $200,000 for degrees in other medical fields or law, for example.
“There’s real concern on the part of the administration that folks are over-borrowing, maybe they’re taking on too much debt, and we share those concerns,” Beard said. “But what we know from experience is that when you’re taking to market programs where there’s a high earning premium on that investment, that indebtedness becomes a high-value investment that delivers a handsome return.”
Beard said that while these changes will have “some disparate impacts across higher education,” he believes “the intention behind the policy is sound.”
Trump administration policy shifts, and cuts in federal health care spending, are leading to growing concerns around the health of the broader hospital system across the country. While Beard acknowledged those realities, he also said he continues to focus on the needs of an aging population already with a gap in care.
“We continue to be optimistic that just the sheer magnitude of the need, particularly as our population ages, will bring common sense solutions to some of the funding and insurance dynamics, and will also elevate the appetite for the kinds of innovations that allow the healthcare workforce to have an even more positive impact on the people they care for every day,” he said.
