The Partnership Higher Education and Health Care Need to Build

Many health care administrative employees have strong work experience but limited access to employer-aligned credential pathways. Higher education has an enrollment problem. If they work together, they can solve both problems.

Health care workforce conversations often focus on clinical shortages: nurses, physicians, behavioral health providers. But there’s a parallel crisis in the administrative and operational part of the business. At the same time, higher education is grappling with an enrollment crisis. If both organizations work together to create workforce-aligned health care administration programs, they can address both these challenges at once.

The Administrative Workforce Gap

Hospitals and medical practices need more than doctors and nurses. They need people to negotiate payer contracts, maintain regulatory compliance, manage patient flow, and oversee billing. Today, many medical practices are struggling to find qualified people to fill these positions. According to the Medical Group Management Association, 58 percent of medical practices identified staffing as their top challenge heading into 2023. One-third reported difficulty hiring administrative and front-desk personnel specifically.

The hiring situation is not expected to improve. The Bureau of Labor Statistics projects 23 percent growth in medical and health services managers from 2024 to 2034, with more than 62,000 openings every year for the next decade. These are careers with strong earnings potential — the median annual salary is $117,960 — that require at least a bachelor’s degree, and sometimes a master’s.

The ideal candidates for these positions are the people already working in entry-level roles who, through experience, have learned the systems and understand the business. If these employees want to advance into positions that involve hiring, budgeting, and managing clinical operations more comprehensively, they need a degree. And to be fully prepared to take on these roles, that degree needs to reflect the job as it exists today as well as where the field is headed. Many health care teams have major skill gaps in data analytics, leadership capabilities, and AI literacy.

The Enrollment Pressure

Higher education has an enrollment problem. The number of high school graduates peaked in 2025 and is expected to decline 13 percent through 2041. This is driven primarily by falling birth rates — a problem it will take 18 years to solve. More than 4 in 10 private colleges posted operating losses in fiscal year 2023, and that share has been rising. Fitch, Moody’s, and S&P all issued negative outlooks for the sector heading into 2026. Institutions need new enrollment channels.

As tuition continues to increase, parents and students are also choosing schools based on career outcomes. Federal legislation is adding to this pressure. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act introduces a new “Gainful Employment for All” accountability standard for all higher education degree programs, excluding undergraduate certificate programs. According to this standard, four years after program completion, the median earnings of graduates who received federal aid must be higher than the median earnings of a comparison group without equivalent postsecondary credentials. Institutions that fail to meet this metric risk losing federal funding.

Where These Two Problems Meet

Health care systems are already trying to solve their workforce crisis through tuition reimbursement, which is incentivized through tax benefits. Employers can offer up to $5,250 per employee per year tax-free. The money is there, but too often, it sits unused or goes toward programs that weren’t designed with the employer’s operational needs in mind. Working adults only want to go back to school if they can be sure the degree they earn will help them advance in their career.

There are plenty of online health care administration programs offered by institutions like WGU, Purdue Global, and Capella. They all promise a flexible, fully online experience for their students that culminates in a degree. Some were developed with limited employer input in the form of labor market analyses, advisory board reviews, or alumni surveys. But just a few were built in direct collaboration with the health care systems that will employ these graduates. Edmonds College built a BAS in integrated health care management in direct collaboration with Washington state health care employers. AdventHealth owns AdventHealth University, which specializes in health care education.

In spite of these programs, workforce challenges remain the top concern for hospital CEOs. There’s also very little publicly available data regarding the outcomes of these programs, even from the institutions that produce them. While many institutions self-report salary bumps for graduates, they do not provide data on how well these programs are aligned to competencies. This is the gap that a well-crafted, co-designed health care admin degree program could fill.

Both health care systems and higher ed institutions could benefit from a degree pathway that builds on the applied experience health care admins already have, teaches the strategic and analytical skills the organization needs next, and produces graduates whom a health care organization can promote with confidence. This partnership would bring to the health care system deeply qualified internal hires who not only have the right credentials but also know the system, workflows, and patient populations. The institution would get a program built with employer input that makes it defensible under new accountability standards and differentiates it from competitors. It would also walk away with a model that could extend into nursing leadership, health informatics, public health, and other fields.

On the clinical side, this kind of deep partnership already exists. Hofstra University and Northwell Health built a joint School of Nursing and Physician Assistant Studies that places graduates across Northwell’s clinical network. Kaiser Permanente created its own School of Allied Health and launched Futuro Health to create more credentialed allied health workers. Memorial Hermann Health System covers the full cost of degrees for employees through its Learn Well program. It’s time to do the same thing on the administrative side.

How This Comes Together

This partnership will take time and careful planning to be successful. Here’s how it could work.

Why Now?

Institutions should start thinking now about whether their programs will pass the earnings outcomes test, and what changes they might want to make to ensure that they do. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act’s earning standards take effect July 1, 2026, and the Department of Education will start calculating the first earnings test metrics in 2027. Programs that fail to meet these initial metrics will be notified in July 2027, and those that fail to meet the standards two years out of three will lose access to federal student loans for at least two years. At the same time, the health care workforce gap is widening.

A co-designed program would give the health care system a tailored talent pipeline and the institution an employer-validated program with a built-in enrollment channel and strong earnings outcomes. The partnership infrastructure would even extend to nursing leadership, health informatics, public health, and other fields. Co-designed programs are an underdeveloped opportunity, and the institutions and health care systems that partner now will be on the front lines of workforce-aligned program design.

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