Tuition Reimbursement: What MHA Applicants and Students Need to Know

The educational and career backgrounds of MHA students provide them with a unique set of marketable skills that may help them pay for their degree. Moreover, in an era when student loan financing has become increasingly unpopular, these skills can help MHA students rely less on student loans than students in other types of graduate and professional programs.

Read on for our analysis of some ways that MHA applicants and students might wish to leverage the value of their skills through an important type of employee benefit program.

Tuition reimbursement refers to an important employee benefit plan for MHAs. Often called tuition assistance these days, in such programs, an employer agrees to pay for a predetermined number of college or graduate school courses that an employee can apply towards a degree, such as an MHA degree.

One of the many reasons why employers benefit from these programs is that enrolled employees develop more advanced skills and acquire knowledge that makes them more efficient or productive on the job, which may help them qualify for promotions sooner. These programs also provide competitive advantages through incentives that help hospitals and clinics recruit employees for low additional costs, especially in high-demand fields like nursing.

In 2025, programs like these are prevalent and relatively common. In the United States, companies spend about $28 billion annually on this benefit, according to the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce. A 2024 survey by SHRM, the Society for Human Resource Management, also showed that 46 percent of employers nationwide offered tuition assistance to their employees who enroll in college or graduate school. That proportion is relatively stable, with an earlier 2021 SHRM survey showing 48 percent.

But there’s an important fact about these programs that MHA students and applicants need to know: Tuition reimbursement is arguably the most underutilized employee benefit in the American economy by a wide margin—and a long series of studies dating back many years supports this conclusion. There are quite literally hundreds of companies in this country that emphasize tuition assistance programs as an attractive benefit to entice employees they recruit, while, as we’ll see below, they nonetheless pay little to nothing for those benefits to their employees in any given year.

For example, in 2021, the University of Nevada published a study revealing that historically, between only 2 and 10 percent of all employees ever received any tuition assistance benefits. The researchers argued that such programs are based on “outdated models in which too few employees participate.”

Other findings that same year by the management consulting firm Bain & Company concurred with the Nevada team’s conclusions. Bain discovered from unexpected employee survey results that only about a quarter of the respondents had even started an application for a tuition assistance benefit—and only 2 percent eventually took coursework for which these programs paid. And according to Northeastern University, about 60 percent of working professionals don’t even know about their employer’s current benefits.

A growing number of employers now prepay universities directly for employees’ coursework. This practice encourages program participation and course enrollments, and at many companies has turned the “reimbursement” portion of this term into a misnomer.

Such “no-cost” options make it much easier for employees to access the benefits. These options also prevent them from paying for the tuition up-front while waiting for reimbursement after the end of the course, which in practice, resulted in many employees suffering cash-crunch financial hardships, or ending up forced to absorb the costs of steep interest charges on credit card cash advances or bank lines of credit.

MHA applicants and degree candidates need to familiarize themselves with the reimbursement options available from a potential employer if they might want to work there before or during graduate school. A best practice is to ensure they have access to such “no-cost” benefits by negotiating with potential employers prior to accepting an employment offer. Why? For some employees, that leverage might no longer be available during on-the-job negotiations later on.

Now, here’s where potential MHA applicants and students who could benefit from tuition assistance potentially have important advantages over students in closely related programs, such as MBA students, who typically come from the ranks of undergraduate economics and business majors as well as engineering graduates. According to both Michigan State University and Louisiana State University, unlike MBAs, most MHA students graduated with undergraduate degrees in healthcare-related majors. These typically include biology, nursing, pre-med studies, organic chemistry, genetics, biomedical engineering, and popular related interdisciplinary majors such as human biology.

That’s very good news for MHA students who need tuition reimbursement support. The reason is that research from Reddit and other sources indicates that large hospitals and clinics tend to offer more easily accessible—and sometimes more generous—tuition reimbursement benefit packages than many of the Fortune 500 business and tech employers. They’re also geographically convenient, with large medical centers located throughout urban and suburban areas close to where most MHA applicants and students already live.

That makes large medical centers—and especially academic medical centers affiliated with universities—particularly good sources of jobs for MHA students who had already completed health sciences-related coursework as undergraduates. Graduates holding many of these degrees had to complete laboratory science course requirements, especially if their programs were certified as STEM (science, technology, engineering or mathematics) programs by higher education regulators.

What that means is that such graduates are automatically qualified without needing much additional training or experience for a variety of readily accessible technician jobs in medical centers that offer tuition benefits. Typical roles include work as a tech in a clinical laboratory, pharmacy, or sleep lab, and as clinical support specialists within a broad range of patient-facing hospital departments. Many of these roles are characterized by frequent turnover, which means there’s relatively constant demand for these positions; some of these jobs also offer flexible, part-time scheduling, which works well for MHA students who need to reserve time for classes.

Consider this: MHA candidates with undergraduate nursing degrees are in many ways ideal candidates for tuition reimbursement programs at medical centers. For one thing, they’re trained in a field with massive shortages in many areas of the country, which virtually guarantees them high pay and a strong negotiation advantage that should deliver other benefits like flexible work scheduling to accommodate their classes. However, even if no jobs for nurses currently exist at a nearby medical center with an attractive tuition assistance program, they’re meanwhile trained through their undergraduate programs for many closely related jobs in fields like physical therapy, as well as specialist and assistant roles in laboratories and pharmacies.

The Cleveland Clinic, Stanford University and Stanford Medicine, Providence, Ascension, UVA Health, Trinity Health, UCLA Health, Intermountain Healthcare, Massachusetts General Brigham, and the Memorial Hermann Health System are known to offer these reimbursement programs. Furthermore, academic medical centers with more comprehensive tuition-reimbursement programs will reimburse employees for tuition at other institutions for degree programs. Some medical centers affiliated with residential MHA (and related) programs, such as Johns Hopkins University, are often compelled to offer those benefits; this is because many of their on-campus employees who are applying to graduate school may struggle to gain admission to their own university’s highly selective academic programs.

Besides the relative ease of access to these jobs for those with healthcare-related undergraduate work, another advantage to jobs at hospitals is that tuition reimbursement becomes available at some centers after only a few months of continuous employment, sometimes for only 20 part-time hours per week.

For example, the Cleveland Clinic offers some of the most liberal terms of any of these programs we’ve seen. CC’s program becomes available after only 90 days to all eligible full- and part-time employees who enroll in two-year, bachelor’s, and graduate degree programs. By contrast, many non-healthcare employers will only offer this benefit after at least a year of full-time employment, and some firms in industries like public accounting have been reported to require continuous employment for up to two years after graduation from a graduate degree program.

Most hospitals will pay the tax-advantaged federal tuition share of $5,250 annually. As we point out in our BSchools article, that means these corporations are themselves “reimbursed” by the federal government through tax credits for paying employee tuition under §127 of the Internal Revenue Code. This is why most American corporations pay practically nothing to offer these benefits each year.

A few organizations, like Johns Hopkins, will pay as much as $10,000 per year for graduate tuition for accredited degree programs. Others like Novartis and UnitedHealth Group will pay 100 percent of tuition up to the statutory limit so long as the coursework is job-related. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that a course needs to be related to a particular employee’s precise job description. For example, UnitedHealth Group employees can take courses related to any job within the company, not only their current role.

The research also suggests that MHA student employees would probably receive better benefits from jobs in hospitals than from roles with outpatient clinics. For example, Kaiser Permanente offers tuition reimbursement benefit programs for clinic employees, but caps benefits at only $3,000 per year.

We should also point out that MHA students may find additional tuition reimbursement opportunities available from their universities through graduate teaching and research assistantships. Although many research assistants who work for health sciences colleges have to work on campus in faculty-supervised laboratories, these days, many teaching assistants are assigned to teach lower-division undergraduate courses and lead discussion sections that are conducted entirely online.

It may be true that universities have traditionally awarded assistantships to highly qualified graduate students with excellent undergraduate GPAs. But that’s not always true in every case. In addition to paying monthly stipends, universities customarily waive tuition and fee charges for their research and teaching assistants. For most MHA students, the substantial value of such waivers would easily justify the extra time and effort required to apply and interview for such assistantship jobs.

In a healthcare landscape where both college costs and workforce shortages are top concerns, tuition reimbursement programs offer a rare win-win. For MHA students—especially those with clinical training—these benefits can dramatically reduce debt while unlocking career paths with lasting impact. Whether they aspire to lead healthcare systems or shape public health policy, MHA candidates who take advantage of tuition reimbursement programs can start building that future right away without compromising their financial health and well-being.