When Steve Beard took over as CEO of a higher education company Adtalem Global Education In 2021, the company was undergoing a major strategic change. It had identified gaps in the health workforce pipeline, which were expected to increase. That led Adtalem to exit its other education business units and focus solely on health education.
At the time, Beard said the company could have changed its name, allowing it to “claim a different positioning.” However, as he looked at the increasingly fragile healthcare workforce, he wanted to make sure he was a critical part of solving that problem before planting a new flag.
Last week, Adtalem announced it was changing its name to Covista, which Beard said reflects what the company has done so far, but also what it sees in the future.
“Each year we graduate 97,000 students, 385,000 alumni and 24,000 healthcare students,” Beard said. “We're just getting started; there's a tremendous opportunity to continue to expand this platform, to scale these institutions, to bring even more day-one-ready talent into US healthcare, but also to have a more definitive voice in the role it plays in the delivery of care in the US.”
Those student numbers position Covista as a critical player in the U.S. healthcare landscape. The 24,000 healthcare professionals graduating from its schools each year are more than any institution and represent approximately 10% of U.S. nurses. Covista also trains twice as many physicians as any medical-granting school in the U.S. and is the No. 1 provider of doctors of veterinary medicine in the U.S., according to its data.
Covista's healthcare ambitions
Beard said the company worked on several ideas for how a new name could help tell the story. “I'm not a marketer, I don't have a creative background, so it was fascinating to see how the naming process unfolds,” Beard said, adding that discussions ranged from the science of using real words versus made-up words, the ways 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, which implies the idea of community and sharing, and vista, “the idea of creating a shared vision for the future around healthcare and access to these careers for people who have historically been excluded from them.”
But there was one message from the appointing advisers that Beard said caught his attention. “[They] “He continued to remind us every step of the way that a brand is as important as what's inside it,” he said. “It's a promise, and it's only as valuable as the extent to which people believe that promise has been kept.”
A name change is not completely new territory for the organization as a whole. In 2017, DeVry Education Group changed its name to Adtalem Global Education to “represent all institutions in the group,” according to an SEC filing. At the time, the company's business came from three different educational focuses: medical and health care, career education, and technology and business. That name change also came several months after Adtalem settled lawsuits with both the FTC and the Department of Education over charges related to DeVry's graduate work and salary claims. Adtalem sold DeVry in 2018.
The schools that make up Covista will not be changing their names, but Beard said this moment of renaming will allow them to “connect to an enterprise-level vision that is much broader and bigger” than each school could aspire to on its own.
“It's about setting the aspiration even higher than ever, giving our people permission to think big about what they can achieve individually and think big about what we can achieve collectively,” Beard said.
How to face the main challenges of the labor market
That includes Covista playing a leadership role in some of the challenges facing the healthcare industry. Last year, the company announced a partnership with Google Cloud to launch an AI credentialing program designed to teach healthcare students and practicing doctors how to better use the technology in their roles. Covista also launched a new impact program aimed at building and sustaining the healthcare workforce, including working with partners to promote career exploration in healthcare and expand support for the mental health and well-being of healthcare workers.
In the Labor Department's latest nonfarm payrolls report covering the national labor market, health care positions again led gains among sectors. Beard said as he looks at the healthcare landscape, the opportunities for Covista have him excited.
“I remain optimistic about it, if only to recognize that demographic trends in American society are such that we are going to have to rely more and more on the health care system,” Beard said. “We have an aging population, we have many more people who need to rely on this system for care and quality of life, and that creates the kind of need around innovation.”
However, clinical workforce shortages and implications for quality of care are growing challenges in healthcare.
There are more than 8.4 million available healthcare jobs in the United States, Covista data suggests, representing more than two job openings for every unemployed healthcare worker. This is putting additional pressure on the system and the workers within it: 73% of healthcare executives and 76% of physicians say staffing shortages compromise the quality of care they can provide, according to a Covista poll conducted by Gallup of more than 1,300 physicians and 160 healthcare executives.
The survey was conducted as part of its rebranding, and Beard said it highlights that this is not just a staffing issue, but a patient care crisis.
“We've talked a lot about chronic workforce challenges, the asymmetry between supply and demand,” he said. “What does it mean for quality of care? What does it mean for satisfaction among clinicians, 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 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 such as 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 turn commit to joining the employer's workforce upon graduation. One of those programs, between Chamberlin University and Midwest health system SSM Health, is expected to produce more than 400 new nurses a year.
“We believe that that model, which we intend to replicate in other markets where we can really generate new demand for entry into these professions, is a way to overcome some of these chronic labor shortages where they are most acute,” Beard said.
However, there have been some challenges for the for-profit college industry that could affect the number of students entering these programs. As part of the One Big Beautiful Bill, the Trump administration placed limits on federal student loans for graduate degrees. It also removed nursing degrees from the professional degree designation, meaning it will have a total borrowing limit of $100,000 compared to $200,000 for degrees in other medical fields or law, for example.
“There is a real concern on the part of the administration that people are taking on excessive debt, maybe they are taking on too much debt, and we share those concerns,” Beard said. “But what we know from experience is that when programs are launched on the market in which there is a high profit premium on that investment, that debt becomes a high-value investment that offers an attractive return.”
Beard said that while these changes will have “some disparate impacts on higher education,” he believes “the intent behind the policy is sound.”
The Trump administration's policy changes and cuts to federal health care spending are raising growing concerns about the health of the overall hospital system across the country. While Beard acknowledged those realities, he also said he continues to focus on the needs of an aging population that already has a gap in care.
“We remain optimistic that just the magnitude of the need, particularly as our population ages, will bring common-sense solutions to some of the financing and insurance dynamics, and will also raise the appetite for the types of innovations that will enable the healthcare workforce to have an even more positive impact on the people they care for every day,” he said.
