How Scholarships Can Fight America's Healthcare Shortages: Tess Michaels on the Career Education Report
Nursing and doctor shortages get the headlines, but they're only part of a bigger problem: the U.S. is on track to be short nearly three million healthcare workers in the next few years. On a recent episode of the Career Education Report, host Dr. Jason Altmire talked with Clasp founder and CEO Tess Michaels about the scope of the crisis and how Clasp's employer-funded scholarship model is trying to fix it.
The gap is widest in roles nobody talks about.
Allied health roles — rad techs, respiratory therapists, surgical techs, nurse anesthetists — often have vacancy rates more than double nursing's. Some states have outright training deserts: Idaho didn't have a single nurse anesthesia program until this year.
"When we think about the healthcare shortage, it's not about what does the workforce pipeline look like, what's the quality of it, it's really just around what does patient care look like?"
The stakes are concrete, not abstract — Michaels cited University of Pennsylvania research showing understaffing contributed to nearly 20% of hospital-related deaths during COVID.
The current system has the sequence backwards.
Students take on debt and risk up front with no guaranteed job; employers only react once a shortage is already a crisis, patching it with sign-on bonuses and contract labor. Clasp flips that sequence — employers commit to a student while they're still in school, similar to the ROTC model:
"They meet these individuals while they're in school. At that point, they give them a commitment: we are going to hire you when you graduate, and you will come work with us for, call it a four-year work commitment. And we will have all of your student loans repaid over that period."
Repayment happens monthly, tied to active employment. If someone leaves early, there's no clawback, they just forgo future payments. Nobody's trapped, and nobody's worse off for trying.
The revenue model is designed to avoid conflicts of interest.
Clasp doesn't charge students or schools, and doesn't take a cut of the loan repayment itself. Instead, revenue comes from admin fees charged to employers for running the program. Since founding in 2018, the company has scaled to pediatric, oncology, home health, and academic hospitals nationwide, growing its healthcare employers 4x last year alone.
The real story right now is policy.
Under new federal student loan caps, many advanced healthcare degrees — nurse practitioners, PAs, nurse anesthetists, PTs/OTs — were classified as not "professional degrees," capping federal borrowing at $100K instead of $200K, even though many of these programs cost $140K–$200K. Michaels also flagged a quieter risk: eroding nonprofit hospitals' recruiting edge, since many clinicians choose employers based on eligibility for Public Service Loan Forgiveness, which only applies to federal loans. Her take:
"This is exactly when these educational institutions and these employers need to band together to get a bit more creative. And second, it's a moment for us to really reflect on who is going to be disproportionately affected."
Listen to the full episode, "How Scholarships Can Fight America's Healthcare Shortages," for more, including how Michaels thinks about competitors entering the space and more detail on how the employer-student matching process works.
🎙️Listen now: Career Education Report.