There is a version of the American healthcare shortage that never makes the news: not the empty ICU bed or the twelve-hour wait, but the classroom seat. Someone has to be taught to do the job before anyone can do it. The company now called Covista has spent five decades circling that idea, and this year it finally decided to name itself after it.
If the name is new, the company is not. Covista Inc. is the Chicago business that used to be Adtalem Global Education, which used to be DeVry Education Group, which grew out of a career-training school with roots in 1930s Chicago. On February 24, 2026, it began trading on the New York Stock Exchange under a new ticker, CVSA, and retired one of the more recognizable names in for-profit education. The pitch behind the change is unusually specific for a rebrand: Covista wants to be treated as part of the country's healthcare infrastructure, not just its education sector.
01 / What it actually doesOne company, five schools, one job
Strip away the corporate wrapper and Covista is a holding company for schools that teach people to care for patients. It runs five accredited institutions, organized into three reporting segments - Chamberlain, Walden, and a combined Medical & Veterinary group. Between them they teach roughly 97,000 students at any given time and have produced a community of about 385,000 alumni.
The centerpiece is Chamberlain University, one of the largest nursing schools in the United States, offering everything from pre-licensure bachelor's degrees to graduate nursing. Walden University, acquired in 2021, is an online university heavy on health, nursing, social work and psychology programs aimed at working adults. On the physician and veterinary side sit Ross University School of Medicine, Ross University School of Veterinary Medicine, and the American University of the Caribbean School of Medicine - island-based schools that route graduates into U.S. clinical training.
The number the company likes best is a ratio: it says the roughly 24,000 healthcare professionals it graduates each year add up to close to 10% of America's nurses. Whether or not you accept the exact figure, the scale is the point. Covista is not a boutique. It is a factory for clinicians, and it has decided to say so out loud.
02 / The problem it sells againstA gap you can graph
Covista's entire argument rests on a single mismatch, and to make it the company launched something it calls the Care Capacity Monitor. The framing is deliberate: an unfilled clinical role is not a "vacancy," it is lost capacity to care for someone. The data it points to is blunt.
The rest of the picture rhymes with that top-line number. Covista's research cites that 76% of clinicians say staffing shortages hurt the quality of care they can deliver, and that 85% of rural healthcare executives cannot find enough local talent to hire. Meanwhile a meaningful slice of physicians - both specialists and primary-care doctors - say they may leave within a year. The company's read is that the market cannot recruit its way out of this. Someone has to make more clinicians.
03 / Who it servesStudents first, hospitals second
Covista has two customers, and they are stacked. The direct customers are students - largely working adults, career-changers, and international medical and veterinary candidates - who pay tuition for degrees with a clear vocational payoff. The indirect customers are the hospitals, clinics, and health systems that hire the graduates. That second group is why Covista keeps talking about workforce pipelines: its product's value is ultimately measured in filled shifts.
It is a demographic that skews older, more diverse, and more online than a traditional four-year campus. Walden and Chamberlain in particular are built for people who are already working - sometimes already in healthcare - and want to move up a credential.
04 / How the money worksTuition, at scale, in three buckets
The business model is old-fashioned in the best sense: students pay tuition and fees, and Covista teaches them. Revenue lands in three segments, and the health-and-nursing side does most of the lifting. For fiscal 2025 the company reported revenue of about $1.79 billion and net income near $237 million - a for-profit educator with real margins, not a growth-at-all-costs startup.
What makes the model defensible is not price - it is accreditation, licensure pass rates, and clinical placements. Those are slow, expensive, regulated things to build, and they are exactly what a would-be competitor cannot spin up overnight.
05 / What sets it apartFocus, and a complicated past
Plenty of companies teach nursing. Fewer have decided that healthcare education is the only thing they do. Where rivals like Grand Canyon Education, Strategic Education (Capella and Strayer), and the University of Phoenix spread across business, IT, and general degrees, Covista narrowed - selling off non-core businesses over several years until the portfolio was almost entirely clinical. The rebrand is the exclamation point on that pruning.
The complicating history is real and worth stating plainly. As DeVry, the company reached a $100 million settlement with the Federal Trade Commission in 2016 over advertising that overstated graduate outcomes. Two names and a decade later, Covista's answer to that legacy is to compete on measurable results - licensure, jobs, and the size of the shortage it addresses - rather than on marketing claims. Skeptics remain, which is part of why the outcomes framing matters so much to the company.
06 / The name itselfTwo syllables, a lot of strategy
Covista is an invented word. The company hired Lexicon Branding - the naming firm behind coinages like Pentium and BlackBerry - which built it from "co," for together, and "vista," for a forward view. The practical job of the name was quieter than the marketing suggests: it gave five very different schools, from a Chicago nursing university to a veterinary school in St. Kitts, a single identity that an org chart never could. A word did the work of a merger.
07 / The people running itOperators, not just educators
The expertise inside Covista is a blend that would look unusual on a traditional campus. Steve Beard, the chairman and chief executive, joined in 2018 as general counsel, became chief operating officer, and took the top job in 2021 before being elected chair in 2024 - a legal-and-operations background steering a business that lives and dies by regulation, accreditation, and outcomes. The marketing sits with Maurice Herrera, a chief marketing officer who spent nearly three decades at consumer names like PepsiCo, Campbell's, and Avis Budget before selling degrees instead of soft drinks and rental cars. Around them Covista employs roughly 10,000 people, from nursing faculty and simulation-lab staff to clinical placement teams and data analysts building tools like the Care Capacity Monitor. It is an education company staffed to think like an operator.
08 / Where it sitsThe supply side of care
The neat way to place Covista is to stop thinking of it as an education company and start thinking of it as the supply side of the healthcare labor market. Automation and AI are reshaping a lot of white-collar work, but someone still has to physically care for a patient - and that someone has to be trained, credentialed, and placed. Covista has decided that this unglamorous, deeply human bottleneck is a market it can serve at industrial scale, and it has spent a rebrand and a new ticker telling investors exactly that.
09 / The road hereFour names, one address
Through every one of those names, the headquarters stayed in Chicago - most recently moving into Willis Tower. It is a small detail, but a telling one: the identity kept changing while the institution underneath it did not move. Covista is less a new company than the same one that finally figured out what to call itself.
At a glance: Covista Inc. · NYSE: CVSA · Chicago, Illinois · ~10,000 employees · FY2025 revenue ≈ $1.79B