Conclusion and Recommendations

Cosmetology education in the United States is in dire need of reform. In Mia’s words: “The curriculum needs to be more updated, and more inclusive—inclusive of what’s happening today, versus what was trending five, ten years ago.”¹

Mia ended up wrapping up her program at Paul Mitchell Dallas in March 2020, right as the world plunged into the COVID-19 pandemic. When she reflects on her time there, she wishes she had picked another school. She had praise for a couple of her teachers, but their presence wasn’t enough to mitigate problems, especially the speedy turnover among other instructors. Mia said she was lucky that when she found a job at a salon after graduating, the owner took an interest in her. The owner instructed Mia to shadow her for a couple of weeks while she taught her skills that Mia said Paul Mitchell Dallas never did.

“This is what I should have been learning,” Mia said.

Yet beauty schools prioritize profit over students. What should be a pathway to economic opportunity and artistic fulfillment has devolved into an exploitative system. These institutions not only resist necessary changes but wield significant power to shape policy that cements the status quo. Their representatives are embedded on regulatory boards. They lobby tirelessly against efforts to reduce licensure hours, ensuring their control over curricula and perpetuating long, costly programs. They also have skirted real responsibility in the federal financial aid system, taking advantage of not just students’ but also of taxpayers’ money.

This entrenched influence costs students. Many of them are from historically marginalized backgrounds and enter programs where the hallmarks are outdated training and under-resourced instruction. They often leave saddled with debt and unprepared for careers that pay less than a living wage. The cycle of undereducation and economic struggle, all incentivized in large part by federal financial aid, underscores a need for urgent action.

Below are six New America policy recommendations for better supporting students on the cosmetology pathway and weeding out predatory actors from the industry.

1. Promote Registered Apprenticeship options. As seen with Janice Dorian’s cosmetology program, the incentives for students are better aligned in an apprenticeship program than with a traditional accredited program. Establishing a Registered Apprenticeship program takes many steps, including identifying sponsors and partners, completing a registration process with either the federal Office of Apprenticeship or State Apprenticeship agency, and developing core components to the program, including ensuring that the program is industry-led, apprentices are paid, and they receive on-the-job training. The drive to set up these programs should come from state boards and the local industry employers who can help push schools to pursue new models of education that result in a well-trained pool of cosmetologists.

2. Evaluate licensing hour requirements. Licensing hour requirements vary widely, averaging 1,500 hours nationally, with no clear link between more hours and better outcomes. States should reassess these requirements, focusing on consumer health, safety, and service quality. States should compare their requirements to states with lower thresholds and consider reducing hours where justified.

3. Require that curricula reflect student and market needs. Many students in New America’s focus groups said that they felt like they were limited to learning how to cut, style, and treat White people’s hair using antiquated methods, even though they were going to school with the hopes of learning new and innovative techniques to perform on diverse clientele, including those with textured hair. State boards should revise their requirements for licensing exams to include more up-to-date services and to ensure all students are trained to understand and work with textured hair. States without these requirements can look to places like New York, which was the vanguard in requiring a more inclusive curriculum.

4. Evaluate state board membership. Representatives from beauty schools sitting on licensing and other state boards do not present an inherent conflict of interest and could represent valuable experience. But because cosmetology schools have proven time and again they are chiefly interested in shielding their own industry, state officials should evaluate whether their inclusion on these panels means a conflict of interest that harms students.

5. Hold schools accountable for extremely low wages. For over 50 years, career-oriented schools have battled against oversight and accountability that threaten their access to federal financial aid programs. This has led to exploitive and predatory behaviors from segments of our postsecondary education system, particularly at cosmetology schools. Earnings data from cosmetology programs that receive federal financial aid show that many of these programs fail their students, leaving them no better off than if they had only received their high school diploma.

Programs that consistently fail to help their graduates make more than they would have with only their high school diploma and repay their debts need to shape up or lose access to federal financial aid. Participation in the federal aid programs is a privilege, not a right. That privilege should be earned. While many cosmetology programs will fail the gainful employment benchmark, many others will pass. Cosmetology schools with failing outcomes should learn from those meeting earnings and debt-to-earnings standards and improve their programs. Gainful employment regulations have never been fully implemented and are currently held up in court. Congress needs to codify these standards within statute.

6. Limit program length to the state-required minimum. The regulations that would limit program length are currently held up in the courts,² making it a challenge for the Education Department to finalize the rules capping program hours at state licensing requirements to prevent wastage of taxpayer dollars that go well beyond the hour requirement needed for licensure. Congress should also enact laws to prevent schools from exceeding these limits, exploiting students for tuition and unpaid labor. Congress shouldn’t allow taxpayer dollars to pay for more than what the states require.