When Steve Beard became CEO of a higher education company. Adtalem Global Education In 2021, the company was undergoing a significant strategic shift. It revealed that the gap in the healthcare worker pipeline was expected to widen. This resulted in Adtalem withdrawing from other education business segments and focusing solely on healthcare education.
At that moment, Beard said, the company could change its name and “assert a different positioning.” But the company saw healthcare workers becoming increasingly vulnerable and wanted to make sure it was a key part of the solution before planting a new flag.
Adtalem announced last week that it would change its name to Covista, a change that Beard said reflected not only the company’s past performance but also its future prospects.
“Each year, we graduate 97,000 students, 385,000 graduates and 24,000 medical students,” Beard said. “We’re just getting started. We have a tremendous opportunity to continue to expand this platform, grow the scale of these institutions, and not only bring even more ready talent to U.S. health care, but also have a more decisive say in the role they play in the delivery of health care in the United States.”
With these student numbers, Covista plays an important role in the U.S. medical field. The 24,000 health care professionals who graduate from Covista schools each year are the most of any institution and represent approximately 10 percent of the nurses in the United States. Covista also educates twice as many MDs as any other MD-granting school in the United States and is the largest supplier of veterinary medicine doctors to the United States, according to its data.
Covista’s Healthcare Ambitions
Beard said the company considered several ideas about how the new name could help tell its story. “I’m not a marketer by training, and I don’t have a creative background, so it was very interesting to see the naming process come together,” Beard said, adding that discussions ranged from the science of using real and made-up words, how certain consonants and vowels create emotional responses when spoken, and how different words are interpreted in different languages and cultures.
Regarding Covista, Beard said the coined word suggests two things. One is “Co,” which suggests the idea of community and sharing, and the other is “the idea of creating a shared vision for the future around health care and access to careers for people who have historically been excluded from them.”
But for Beard, the message from her naming advisor stuck with her. “(They) kept reminding us every step of the way that the importance of the brand is what’s inside it,” he said. “This is a promise, and its value is determined by the extent to which people believe that promise has been fulfilled.”
Name changes aren’t entirely new territory for the organization as a whole. DeVry Education Group changed its name to Adtalem Global Education in 2017 to “represent all educational institutions within the group,” according to an SEC filing. At the time, the company’s business focused on three different types of education: medical and healthcare, professional education, and technology and business. The name change also comes months after Mr. Adtalem settled lawsuits with both the FTC and the Department of Education over charges related to Mr. Debry’s post-graduation work and salary claims. Adtalem sold DeVry in 2018.
While the schools that make up Covista will not change their names, Beard said this renaming moment allows them to “connect to a much broader, much larger corporate-level vision” than what each school could aspire to on its own.
“This is about setting our aspirations higher than ever before and giving our people permission to think even bigger about what we can achieve individually and what we can achieve collectively,” Mr Beard said.
Addressing key challenges in the job market
This includes Covista’s leadership role in several challenges facing the healthcare industry. Last year, the company announced a partnership with Google Cloud and launched an AI certification program aimed at teaching medical students and clinicians how to best utilize technology in their roles. Covista has also launched new impact programs aimed at developing and retaining healthcare workers, including working with partners to accelerate healthcare worker career exploration and expand support for healthcare worker mental health and wellbeing.
In the Department of Labor’s latest nonfarm employment statistics for the national job market, health care jobs once again led the way among sectors. Looking to the healthcare industry, Beard said he is excited about Covista’s opportunity.
“I’m optimistic about this, if for no other reason than recognizing that the demographics of American society are forcing us to increasingly rely on the health care system,” Beard said. “As our population ages, more people need to rely on the system for care and quality of life, which creates the need for innovation.”
However, clinical workforce shortages and their impact on the quality of care are becoming increasingly serious challenges in the medical field.
According to Covista data, there are more than 8.4 million health care job openings in the U.S., meaning there are more than two job openings for every unemployed health care worker. That puts added stress on the health care system and the workers within it. According to a Gallup Covista poll of more than 1,300 clinicians and 160 healthcare executives, 73% of healthcare executives and 76% of clinicians say staffing shortages are reducing the quality of care they provide.
The survey was conducted as part of the rebrand, and Beard said it highlights that this is a patient care crisis, not just a staffing issue.
“We have talked many times about the chronic challenges of the workforce, the asymmetries of supply and demand,” he said. “What does it mean for the quality of health care? What does it mean for clinical professional satisfaction, how they feel about their careers, and their intentions to continue in their careers? What do people think about the role of technology in solving this challenge?”
Not surprisingly, Beard said that while these shortages are impacting health care providers across the country, data suggests the problem is particularly vexing in rural areas. It also varies by medical field, but roles such as radiation therapists and cardiovascular technologists are particularly difficult to fill.
Covista has sought to solve some of these problems through partnerships with universities and employers. It provides tuition assistance and clinical training opportunities to students, and in return they promise to join 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 each year.
“We intend to replicate this model in other markets where we can really create new demand for entry into these occupations, and we believe it is one of the ways to overcome the most severe chronic labor shortages,” Beard said.
However, the for-profit college industry has several challenges that can impact the number of students admitted to these programs. As part of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, the Trump administration placed limits on federal student loans for graduate degrees. Additionally, nursing degrees have been removed from the list of professional degrees, resulting in a total loan limit of $100,000, compared to $200,000 for degrees in other medical fields or law, for example.
“There are big concerns on the part of the government that people are borrowing too much, taking on too much debt, and we share those concerns,” Beard said. “But what we know from experience is that when you bring a program to market that has a high return premium on that investment, that debt becomes an expensive investment with a large return.”
Beard said that although these changes would have a “slightly different impact across higher education,” he believed “the intentions behind the policies are sound.”
The Trump administration’s policy changes and cuts to federal health care spending are raising concerns about the health of the nation’s broad hospital systems. Beard acknowledged this reality, but said the company will continue to focus on the needs of an aging population that already has gaps in care.
“We remain optimistic that the sheer magnitude of the need, especially as our population ages, will lead to common-sense solutions to some of the financing and insurance mechanisms, as well as an appetite for the kinds of innovations that will enable health care workers to have an even more positive impact on the people they care for every day,” he said.
