Chairman and CEO Steve Beard in Fortune: Yale Asked the Right Question. Now the Rest of Higher Education Owes an Answer.
Covista Chairman and CEO Steve Beard has spent his career watching what happens when people are given a real pathway and the support to walk it. His conclusion, arrived at over years of leading America's largest healthcare educator, is this: when the pathway is made accessible, the students deliver.
That conviction sits at the center of a broader reckoning in higher education. Earlier this year, Yale published the findings of a year-long faculty investigation into why Americans have lost faith in higher education. Ten tenured professors. Hundreds of consultations. One unanimous conclusion: the sector has drifted from its purpose. Writing in Fortune, Beard engages with that finding directly—and extends it beyond elite institutions. Higher education, he argues, has tried to be all things to all people, and that diffusion of purpose has cost it the public's trust. The path back is clarity.
Covista Chairman and CEO Steve Beard offers a perspective on how higher education can rebuild public trust by delivering accessible pathways to the careers society needs most, starting with healthcare.
"I have spent my career watching what happens when people are given a real pathway and the support to walk it. It is what reliably happens when you design for the student who is standing at the door rather than the student you imagined when you built it." — Steve Beard, Covista Chairman and CEO
Read Steve Beard's full perspective in Fortune →
