Over the past four years, Covista (formerly known as Adtalem Global Education) has reshaped itself to better address the nation’s shortage of healthcare professionals. In this period, the company pursued several M&A transactions, a digital transformation, a rebranding effort, and strategic partnerships with a range of technology and training providers—all with an eye toward bolstering the supply of workers in US healthcare.
Through its AI-enabled learning tools and data-driven improvements, Covista is showing how technology can strengthen, rather than replace, the human elements of healthcare education.
In this conversation, McKinsey’s Roberta Fusaro and Covista Chairman and CEO Steve Beard discuss the company’s operating model redesign, the adoption of artificial intelligence, partnerships to strengthen healthcare talent pipelines, and the leadership philosophy that sustains change.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
McKinsey: Steve, when you think about transformation, what does it mean in practical terms for your organization—and for students, faculty, and healthcare partners?
Steve Beard: Any transformation isn’t a single initiative. It’s typically a collection of initiatives that, taken together, move an organization from the present state to a more compelling future state. For us, that’s about culture, the operating model, market positioning, and the use of technology to improve outcomes for the stakeholders we serve. It’s a herculean effort for any organization. As you know, most transformations tend to fail or don’t meet anticipated outcomes. But we’ve been fortunate. The transformation has exceeded our original expectations—across growth, operations, and culture.
McKinsey: Transformation always starts with the realization that the old ways won’t carry you into the future. What was that moment for Covista?
Steve Beard: We were confronted with data that we couldn’t ignore: The US produces fewer clinicians than it needs, by a significant margin. The people and the capability are there, but the capacity isn’t. That realization reframed everything for us. This isn’t a talent problem; it’s a production problem—one that can be solved by building the right infrastructure. And once you see the problem that way, the vision follows directly. We needed to build an organization that was systemically important to US healthcare and singularly important to US higher education, both at the same time.
To execute that vision, we had to build a case for change that would reflect the value we could deliver to every stakeholder. For our students, it was a differentiated path to a high-value career. For our employees, it was a sense of purpose and work that really matters, with the professional opportunities to match. For our shareholders, it was a value creation model that would deliver consistent, credible returns. That bundle of imperatives is what launched us on a transformation journey.
McKinsey: It sounds like the case for change was clear, but how did you bring stakeholders with a very diverse set of priorities along with you?
Steve Beard: Change is hard. Nobody loves change. The benefits of enduring it and executing it successfully have to be clear, compelling, and emotionally resonant. So we spoke about the specific needs of each stakeholder group in ways that resonated with them but remained consistent with our overall vision.
McKinsey: How did you get senior leadership and members of the broader organization to buy in?
Steve Beard: We shared with the leadership team and the board our vision of the company as “a category of one”: an enterprise systemically important to US healthcare while still opening doors for the people traditional education has historically left behind—career changers, working parents, adult learners—who are exactly the people healthcare needs most. We are very intentional about the fact that our value proposition isn’t rooted in prestige or selectivity. It’s rooted in expanding access to high-value clinical programs that translate into high-value careers in an industry that desperately needs talent.
Once we had alignment, we began building the operational apparatus to drive execution: a transformation office, initiative leaders, and recognition and incentive programs that rally people around the mission.
McKinsey: Turning to the nuts and bolts, what role did acquisitions and divestitures play in refocusing the company and its capabilities?
Steve Beard: Portfolio rationalization served several important purposes. First, it helped us get down to a portfolio that was easily understood by stakeholders. We determined that the core of the business was healthcare, and that we should focus on that core while divesting noncore assets.
Through a series of acquisitions and divestitures, we narrowed down to the institutions we have today—each postsecondary, and all are centered on healthcare. The biggest programmatic categories are medicine, veterinary medicine, nursing, and social work. From a distance—whether you’re a prospective employer, an interested investor, or a regulator—that portfolio makes sense. It’s clear and credible.
The acquisition of Walden University, which we completed in 2021, was probably the largest in our company’s history. It was big and bold enough to give us permission to rethink how we integrate our legacy assets. And it was important enough that people understood why we were going to change so many other things to make the most of that big bet.
McKinsey: You’ve introduced AI into several of your institutions. What excites you most about how AI can transform healthcare education?
Steve Beard: Before you get excited about AI, you first have to determine whether you need to be terrified by AI. Every leader must ask: Is AI a substitute for the way we create value, or a complement to it? If it’s the former, you’re terrified. If it’s the latter, you’re excited.
For us, AI is absolutely a complement, not a replacement. We started by helping the broader organization become more comfortable with the idea of AI as an enhancement to how they work. There was some natural reticence at first, but now all our audiences are equally enthusiastic. Once you develop organizational AI literacy, you get the benefit of everyone’s best thinking as people develop use cases relevant to the business.
That’s the philosophy behind Always On AI, our enterprise-wide AI fluency program. Through this program, all 10,000 of our faculty members and colleagues have access to learning pathways tailored for different roles and skill levels. This sort of program acknowledges that people build skills in different ways and are at different stages in their AI journey. Building that fluency across our organization allows us to better serve students, strengthen outcomes, and stay at the leading edge of healthcare education.
We’re also embedding AI into the healthcare curriculum, creating AI tutors and advisers that give students 24/7 access to resources that a human adviser wouldn’t be able to provide, and streamlining the front-end experience—enrollment, transfer credits, and financial aid. As our growth and innovation leader likes to say: If you can refinance your home on your phone in a few minutes, you should be able to enroll in school the same way. We’re particularly excited about potential ways to use AI to tailor educational experiences toward the individual needs and readiness levels of students.
We’re also working on the back end with hospitals and technology partners to create curricula that help clinicians use these tools effectively in care settings. For example, our partnership with Hippocratic AI focuses on how nurses and physicians can integrate AI into the care environment. Through our partnership with Google Cloud, we’ve developed healthcare-specific AI credentials available to students and clinicians across all five of our institutions. More than 4,900 learners have enrolled since we launched them. We’re also collaborating with GE Healthcare’s Hello AI program, focused on advancing AI fluency among healthcare professionals and students across the US.
McKinsey: That’s terrific. Are there particular guardrails that you have put in place for some of these AI applications?
Steve Beard: In healthcare, of course, accuracy and reliability are paramount. The industry is moving in an appropriately conservative, careful way to ensure that these tools don’t increase error rates or bias the way professionals think about diagnosis.
With Hippocratic, our focus has been on AI tools that don’t involve substituting the AI agent’s judgment for that of a trained professional. Basic postoperative follow-up is a good example: AI can call the patient, collect recovery information, and share it with the relevant providers in a natural, reassuring way that conveys important data back to the caregiver. It’s an enhancement to the patient experience and to clinician effectiveness—not a replacement for human skill.
In education, the guardrails center on ensuring the agents are complementary to the human professor or adviser and creating process flows that don’t undermine the value of the human relationships the student develops with the faculty.
McKinsey: Covista operates within a complex ecosystem. How do you manage all these partnerships across education, healthcare, and employment sectors?
Steve Beard: We serve more than 100,000 students and over 385,000 alumni, 290,000 of whom are practicing healthcare nationwide. One in ten nurses practicing in America today was trained at one of our institutions. That scale gives us a particular vantage point on what’s happening in the labor market, and what we’re seeing is not a cyclical hiring problem; it’s a structural one. We’re continually monitoring the market, and our data shows that there are roughly 8.4 million healthcare job postings annually in this country, and only 306,000 unemployed healthcare workers nationwide to fill them. Eighty-four percent of healthcare executives have already reduced their capacity to serve patients as a result. Again, this is not a labor market dynamic; it’s a production failure.
And it’s changing our conversation with employers entirely. Historically, our focus was on student access and support—that is, getting people in, getting them through, and getting them placed. Increasingly, employers are coming to us not just to hire our graduates but to think together about how to build a robust talent pipeline. They’re more willing to invest in creative solutions because the old ones—job postings, signing bonuses, competing for the same limited pool—aren’t enough anymore.
Our partnership with SSM Health offers a good example: SSM is a large Catholic healthcare network operating across multiple states. We’re working with them on a program that will deliver about 400 nurses per year at full scale. SSM provides financial support and clinical placements; we integrate their clinicians as faculty. In return, they gain a stable, mission-aligned workforce—nurses who understand their system, culture, and approach to care. This is a repeatable, scalable model we can bring to other partners.
McKinsey: Inside the organization, what behaviors or mindsets did you have to change to make the transformation successful?
Steve Beard: The saying “culture eats strategy for breakfast” couldn’t be truer. First, we needed to help people understand that our commercial imperatives and our academic and social impact imperatives are mutually reinforcing. In fact, they’re the same bet: When the business performs well, more students get access to high-value healthcare careers, and health systems get the talent they need. Growth and purpose aren’t in conflict here.
Second, we needed people to believe that we can do hard things—and do them well. The third big shift was to a results orientation. When we make commitments—to students, to shareholders, to colleagues—we keep them. We make them carefully, and then we deliver consistently.
Finally, we built a culture of integration across the portfolio. Our institutions used to operate independently, sharing little more than common ownership. Now, they collaborate and learn from each other, scaling best practices and innovations across all five institutions. If two of the largest nursing schools in the country, by enrollment, are in the same family, they should be sharing insights. That mindset shift has been transformative.
Overall, one of the most rewarding aspects of the transformation was our bottom-up planning, which reflected ideas coming from all corners of the organization, disproportionately from our frontline colleagues. These ideas became initiatives that, in turn, have created real performance enhancements for the business. Giving employees a line of sight into enterprise strategy is remarkably empowering.
McKinsey: Throughout the transformation, how did you measure success and maintain momentum?
Steve Beard: We built a fantastic transformation office to track initiatives. It’s been staffed with experienced program managers who use a sophisticated database to monitor the transformation’s progress through every stage of execution. Accessible and user-friendly dashboards have allowed managers to quickly assess how their initiatives are doing.
We’ve tracked pacing, value creation, and ROI, but we also focused on learning—sharing what works across institutions. These are academic institutions; we have to present data in a way that’s relevant and digestible for them. We don’t inundate people with findings; we focus on the few metrics that matter most.
The transformation office has become a nerve center for accountability and knowledge-sharing. As we complete our four-year journey, we’re evolving it into a permanent program management function to ensure this discipline endures. Our individual business units have learned a great deal from the transformation process, so there are some categories of initiatives that we can now hand back to the business units to drive and track on their own. However, there are still many other enterprise-level strategic initiatives for which the program management office will be crucial for ensuring their success.
McKinsey: As part of the transformation, you’ve rebranded from Adtalem to Covista. What prompted that decision?
Steve Beard: Through this process, we evolved into a more integrated healthcare education company, and we felt like the brand needed to reflect that—not just visually but strategically. Once we had consolidated down to five like-kind institutions, all of them healthcare-focused, there was a real role for the enterprise brand to play. No individual institution can credibly claim to be systemically important to US healthcare. But the combined portfolio can. With the rebrand, we were able to declare that the first chapter of our transformation was complete, and that the next chapter—focused on using our platform to create impact at scale—starts now.
The new name reflects that ambition. “Co” is short for collaboration and community, and “vista” reflects our vision for the future. It captures a foundational belief: Progress in healthcare starts with people. It was a significant change, no question. We overhauled our identity from the inside out: our name; our visual design; our purpose, vision, and values; and our employee value proposition. We invested heavily in change champions and in equipping managers to explain the why of the transformation. Employees throughout the organization came to understand it through their interactions with their direct managers and, I have to say, it was remarkably well received.
McKinsey: Would you say that everything with the transformation has gone as planned?
Steve Beard: No, we’ve had a ton of challenges. There’s no foolproof way to go about this, but it’s important to be honest about what isn’t working and open to making changes. One example: Early on, we created centers of excellence [CoEs] to centralize certain capabilities. On paper, it made a lot of sense. In practice, the way we initially implemented the CoE structure rotated too much control away from our P&L [profit-and-loss] leaders and slowed execution. About 18 months in, we rebalanced the model, restoring autonomy to those leaders while keeping the shared expertise of the COEs. That adjustment made us faster and more agile. You can’t be dogmatic about your models. Even the best-intentioned ideas have to evolve when they meet real-world complexity.
McKinsey: What lessons would you offer to other CEOs leading major transformations?
Steve Beard: Look for early wins; they help to build credibility. We created a recognition program that celebrated progress, but I think the most potent step we took as a C-suite was to call employees individually and thank them for their contributions. Those conversations—simple as they sound—had an enormous impact. They built momentum and restored energy across the organization. At the outset of a transformation, leadership must bring a sense of confidence and enthusiasm that’s infectious—before there’s evidence. Vision casting at the front end of transformation is extremely important, as is storytelling over the life of the transformation—letting success stories compound over time.
Also—take care of your people. The care and feeding of your people, at the end of the day, makes all the difference. Transformation is long, difficult work. Sustaining energy and belief is essential.
McKinsey: What are the parts of this transformation that only you, as CEO, could do?
Steve Beard: The CEO has to own the vision—casting it, communicating it, and giving people a reason to believe. You also have to own the hard parts: delivering bad news when things don’t go as planned and shielding the organization from external noise. If early investments create temporary financial pressure, it’s my job to carry that weight. I tell my team: Let me worry about the board and shareholders; you stay focused on delivering transformation. Leadership is about protecting the organization’s energy and focus so it can sustain long-term change.
McKinsey: How would you assess the company’s progress from where you started to where you’ve landed?
Steve Beard: Our results as a public company speak for themselves, but the more important outcomes are ahead of us. The US is short of roughly 100,000 physicians and several hundred thousand nurses, and the traditional higher education system is not designed to close this gap. There are real-world consequences associated with this talent shortfall—like the rural hospital that can’t staff its emergency department, or the community where the nearest primary care doctor is 40 miles away.
Through this transformation, we’re now better positioned to help fill these critical healthcare roles. We’re establishing the human infrastructure to close this gap. And we’re making the overwhelming case that healthcare access and quality are not in conflict.
