Originally published by Yahoo! News
Protecting Michigan’s Pathway to Opportunity
By Stacy Wells
A new federal rule could force thousands of beauty, barber, and wellness schools across the country to shut their doors. In Michigan, that means cutting off one of our most accessible pathways to a career and to small business ownership.
The U.S. Department of Education is advancing a proposed rule that would force the closure of more than 90% of beauty and wellness programs nationwide, cutting off career training for an estimated 150,000 students each year and disrupting an industry that employs more than 1.3 million beauty and wellness professionals across the country.
Here is what the rule would do. The Department of Education is proposing an earnings test for career training programs: if a program’s graduates do not out-earn the median high school graduate in their state within a few years, the program loses federal student aid. For most cosmetology, barber, and wellness programs, that loss is a death sentence. The unintended consequences for Michigan would be severe. The state has more than 100,000 active licensed beauty professionals—one of the largest licensed workforces in the state—plus thousands more in barbering and massage therapy, according to the Michigan Department of Licensing and Regulatory Affairs. In a state where a license is required to work in nearly every one of these professions, closing the schools chokes off the pipeline our salons, barbershops, and wellness studios depend on.
What makes this especially troubling is that Congress explicitly excluded these types of certificate programs when it passed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. President Trump signed that law. Now unelected bureaucrats at the Department of Education are expanding the rule beyond what Congress wrote and the President signed—and the consequences will hit Michigan hard.
Across metro Detroit and throughout the state, schools like L’esprit Academy, Douglas J Aveda Institute, Paul Mitchell The School Michigan, and the David Pressley School of Cosmetology are training the next generation of stylists, barbers, estheticians, nail technicians, and entrepreneurs, alongside schools that prepare massage therapists and skincare specialists for careers in the broader wellness economy. These institutions are not just classrooms. They are launching pads for small business ownership in communities across Michigan. Detroit’s own Motor City Match program has helped kickstart beauty and wellness businesses across the city, the kind of neighborhood entrepreneurship that depends on a steady pipeline of licensed professionals.
The beauty and wellness sector remains one of the few industries where someone can quickly upskill, enter the workforce without taking on overwhelming
debt, and still build a stable life with access to the American Dream. It is a workforce made up predominantly of women and a strong pipeline for entrepreneurs who reinvest in their own neighborhoods. Small businesses make up 99.6% of all Michigan businesses and employ nearly half of the state’s private workforce. Salons, barbershops, and wellness studios are exactly the kind of storefronts, usually with only a handful of employees, that line our main streets, from Ford Road to Woodward Avenue, hire locally, and provide the services families rely on every day.
The flaw lies in the metric itself. The Department is applying a one-size-fits-all earnings test that was never designed for this industry. Beauty and wellness professionals often begin their careers working flexible or part-time schedules while they build a client base. Many earn significant income through tips, which the formula excludes entirely.
Under the Department’s own estimates, more than 92% of cosmetology programs and nearly 90% of massage therapy programs would fail, cutting off access to federal student aid and effectively shutting these schools down.
Michigan’s congressional delegation is engaged on this issue, and their continued advocacy will be essential to ensuring the Department implements the law as Congress wrote it.
If this rule moves forward, students across Michigan could lose access to the training required for state licensure, cutting off one of the most direct paths to small business ownership in our state. These are hands-on, in-person careers that BLS projects will grow 5% through 2034, faster than the average for all occupations—the kind of work that cannot be outsourced or automated.
As a licensed Michigan cosmetologist and cosmetology instructor, I have watched our industry create graduates who turn their passion into their profession, accomplish their goals, lift their families out of economic hardship, all while becoming an essential piece in the fabric of their community. The stylist’s chair, the barber’s lineup, the massage therapist’s table: these are not luxuries, these can be life changing. They are small, steady moments of confidence, care, and comfort that working families count on in an increasingly fast-paced world. Think of your own barber or stylist, the person who knows your family, your routine, your story. When these schools close, those chairs start to sit empty.
Walk through any neighborhood, from Detroit to Grand Rapids, and you will find locally owned salons, barbershops, massage studios, and wellness storefronts serving their communities. For generations, cosmetology schools have offered a practical, rapid, and affordable path to independence. Graduates don’t just find jobs. They create them. They become employers, taxpayers, mentors, and pillars of our local economies.
This is exactly the kind of opportunity Michigan needs more of, not less.
Congress wrote this law to protect students and small business owners, not to shutter the schools that train them. The public comment period closes May 20. I have spent my career helping Michiganders build theirs, and I am asking every reader to contact their Member of Congress and demand the Department fix this rule. If we do not act now, the neighborhood salons, barbershops, and wellness studios our families rely on may not be there much longer.
Stacy Wells is a co-founder of L’esprit Academy’s two cosmetology school campuses in the Detroit area, former salon owner, and licensed cosmetologist as well as Vice Chair of the Board of Directors for the American Association of Career Schools (AACS), representing over 700 beauty, barber, and wellness schools nationwide.
