Big for-profit college operation Adtalem, a company whose schools have had a history of deceptive and predatory abuses against students and taxpayers, adopted its name in 2017, changing it from DeVry Education Group. Last week, the company rebranded again — to another, even more pharma-sounding name: Covista.

But warning: Covista may cause side effects including under-education, overwhelming debt, and unemployment.

The company’s CEO, Steve Beard, said in a press release that the name change marked “the culmination of a four-year transformation to become America’s largest healthcare educator and an essential component of America’s healthcare workforce pipeline.” 

Beard’s compensation in 2025 was $17.2 million. Michael Betz, president of the company’s Walden University, received $2.6 million, and chief financial officer Robert Phelan got $2 million.

These executives’ huge salaries are largely paid by American taxpayers.

Chicago-based Covista/Adtalem/DeVry has received tens of billions from the federal government for student grants and loans. It operates nursing and public health-focused Chamberlain University, with programs online and at more than 20 campuses across 15 states; the Caribbean-based medical schools American University of the Caribbean School of Medicine, Ross University School of Medicine, and Ross University School of Veterinary Medicine; and Walden University, an online school with bachelors, masters, and doctoral programs in fields including nursing, psychology, business, criminal justice, and information technology.

The company reported last week that it graduates annually 24,000 healthcare professionals — more, it claims, than any other U.S. school. It says it has 10 percent of nursing grads and that it “educates twice as many MDs as any MD-granting school in the U.S. and is the number one provider of Doctors of Veterinary Medicine to the U.S.” 

But that large market share is a matter of concern when one considers the record of the newly-minted Covista and its schools. 

The company’s schools have advanced the careers of many people, but for others, victims of the company’s bad behavior, the outcomes have been poor.

When Covista was called DeVry, its biggest school was DeVry University, which got into major law enforcement trouble for deceptive practices; DeVry in 2016 agreed to pay $100 million to settle Federal Trade Commission claims of false advertising. The FTC alleged that DeVry deceived prospective students by claiming in advertising that 90 percent of its graduates who were actively seeking employment landed jobs in their field within six months of graduation.

In 2018, Adtalem sold DeVry University, for zero dollars, to an operation run by private equity investor Bradley Palmer, in a deal that lacked fundamental transparency.

Three years later, Adtalem bought a different troubling school, Walden, from another big for-profit college operation, Laureate Education, despite objections from some consumer advocates and from two hedge funds that cited troubles at Walden, including a Justice Department and Department of Education investigation into a whistleblower lawsuit alleging abuses in Walden’s graduate nursing program. 

In November 2023, a notice from the school’s accreditor, Higher Learning Commission, disclosed that the U.S. Department of Education was investigating Walden’s doctoral program. It’s not clear what happened to that probe — I requested documents under the Freedom of Information Act some time ago.

In March 2024, Walden agreed to pay $28.5 million to settle a class action lawsuit alleging that the school, between 2008 and 2018, used false advertising aimed at Black and female students. Walden also agreed to make significant changes in its programs and disclosures to students. The settlement amount was the total that the lawsuit alleged Walden had overcharged students.

The students who sued were enrolled in Walden’s Doctorate in Business Administration (DBA) program. Their lawsuit, filed in federal court in Maryland, claimed Walden recruited Black and female students into the DBA program with false statements about program requirements before forcing them to complete more credit hours than advertised. They alleged that Walden’s conduct violated both consumer protection and civil rights laws. In 2016, 41 percent of all Walden doctoral students identified as Black — more than seven times the national average of Black students in doctoral programs. Almost 77 percent identified as female.

Troubling practices appear to have continued at Walden under Adtalem/Covista.  Last summer I spoke with two Walden adjunct professors from separate academic departments (one who had recently left the school); each described troubling conduct.

One of the instructors said that his supervisors regularly pressured him to give passing grades to flunking students, including students who had done no work, in order to keep them enrolled.  This instructor also described a “blitzkrieg marketing campaign aimed at Latino students,” focused on the school’s Tempo program, which promises to let students learn at their own pace. The instructor said that the marketing led to the enrollment of many people who “were not ready for any kind of graduate education, if anything at Walden could be described as education.” Many were people from Venezuela and Colombia, some seemed motivated to enroll out of concern about the Trump administration’s deportation efforts, and some were struggling with English, Walden’s language of instruction. 

The instructor said Walden then “[turned a blind eye to AI usage” and plagiarism by students and that there was “a major cheating scandal among this influx of unprepared students” and that Walden swept the scandal “under the rug.” This instructor says he observed blatant and reckless cheating by students.

The second Walden instructor also said that Walden admitted people who are “not prepared to do graduate level work” and that Walden was not teaching them to do so.

This instructor says he was pressured by managers to “go along with the plagiarism” by students. He says that Adtalem, when it took over Walden, “wanted to turn it into a conveyor belt of getting as many people through as possible” and “abandon all quality control” and the school became “a plagiarism factory.”  He called instruction at the school “extremely superficial,” adding “you can get an A by faking it.  You didn’t learn anything.”

When Adtalem took over, this instructor says, it asked Walden faculty to sign nondisclosure agreements, which the prior owner, Laureate, did not require. 

The two Walden instructors asked that I not use their names, because of concern about their careers.

Covista did not respond to a request for comment on the Walden instructors’ allegations.