The Beauty School Industry Is in Jeopardy, and These Utah Leaders Are Asking for Help

Walking into Skinworks School of Advanced Skincare in South Salt Lake this Monday is a little eerie. I’ve been coming to this student spa and esthetician school for a decade now, maybe more, for manicures, facials and even laser hair removal. But today the spa is closed, and sitting here instead are the school’s owner, Natalie Parkin, and two other figures in the Utah beauty industry, Brenda Scharman, owner of Cameo College of Essential Beauty, and Lenore Gibson, owner of COLLECTIV Academy.

“Everything’s in jeopardy right now,” Parkin says as we sit down. Scharman and Gibson nod. Though in some ways they are competitors, they are here today to tell me about the threat facing the beauty industry across the country: the possible end of federal financial aid for beauty schools. 

Scharman, who’s also the legislative chair of the Utah Beauty Association, explains: As part of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act that Donald Trump signed last year, the Department of Education may create stricter eligibility requirements for postsecondary education programs to offer federal financial aid to students looking to enroll. The problem? The metrics the department wants to use would mean that 92% of beauty schools across the country would lose access to the financial aid on which many students rely. Scharman says that move could effectively shutter the industry and foreclose potential careers for the next generation of cosmetologists, hairdressers, barbers, estheticians and more. 

The government’s argument is that, by its metrics, the graduates of these kinds of beauty schools go on to make less than those who only have a high school degree. If they’re not making enough money to justify having gone through a program, why fund their schooling with public money? 

Well, because those metrics are flawed, Scharman says, and if 92% of an industry fails a test, then the test might be the problem. For instance, the federal data that’s being used to argue these graduates don’t go on to make enough doesn’t take into account money earned from tips or collected through direct payments, like Venmo, which accounts for a large part of their income, and it also doesn’t account for those who are self-employed, which similarly makes up a huge chunk of the people the ruling would affect. 

Comparing beauty school grads to median high school grads is flawed, too, the three say, because beauty school grads are a specific population, often women who value flexibility and choose to work part time, whereas workers with only high school education is a broad category filled with people who are often full-time, male workers who may have also received some kind of trade school training that the metrics don’t recognize as more than a high school degree. So, you have a broad group of full-time workers with additional training being compared to a select population of part-time college grads who aren’t having large portions of their income accurately counted.

Plus, Parkin says, they’re being measured at maybe the worst time: The department’s metrics look at students’ earnings four years after graduating. That may sound like a sensible moment to measure, but in this industry, she says, that’s still early. “The normal thing with any business owner is they’re building up their clientele,” she says. “So even four years into it, we recommend they don’t go directly into ownership.” Often they’ll go and work at a Massage Envy or a Sports Clips. They’ll do two or three years that way and then may start pursuing their own venture, which could mean a lot of up-front costs. “The year that they’re measuring them is the year that might be their smallest year,” Parkin says.

If the desire truly is to cut wasteful spending, well, why these programs? Gibson says that, for one thing, she believes they are sometimes seen as more frivolous because they focus on traditionally feminine beauty practices. There are also already regulations in place about how they support graduates: “Right now, we can’t run a school without a high graduation rate, a high placement rate,” Gibson says. “We’re responsible for them getting a job, so we have to track them for six months after they graduate, and then our passing rates. So we do have metrics.” Scharman says she understands the federal government’s desire to minimize predatory student loan debt but that this industry isn’t the problem. “When you look at the cosmetology sector, the student debt for [the] cosmetology sector alone, or beauty sector, is one half of 1%,” Scharman says. 

Our conversation at Skinworks is full of these kinds of nuances, insights into the reality of these female-dominated career paths that the Department of Education’s ruling doesn’t take into account. Gibson, Scharman and Parkin argue that it should. If the ruling moves forward, it would take effect fast — this July — kicking off a slow death for programs across the country, Scharman says, as schools fail to meet the new metrics and have to notify prospective students that they will lose access to federal financial aid and student loans.

According to the Utah Beauty Association, Utah currently has an estimated 58,000 licensed working beauty professionals. That number would dwindle as private programs close down, and the cost for those services may even increase over time as fewer are trained to perform them, Scharman says. Plus, commercial spaces housing salons may also suffer as fewer professionals are available to rent booth space or sell beauty products. 

The Department of Education is accepting public comment about the ruling through Wednesday, May 20, at 11:59 p.m., and the Utah Beauty Association, along with the American Association of Career Schools, is urging professionals and the public to voice their opinion before then. 

For more information on how to submit a comment, visit myaacs.org

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