Panel Recommends Denying Recognition to Cosmetology Accreditor

The National Accrediting Commission of Career Arts and Sciences—one of the nation’s largest cosmetology and massage therapy accreditors—shouldn’t be recognized by the federal government, the National Advisory Committee on Institutional Quality and Integrity said Wednesday.

In a 9-to-3 vote, the committee that advises on accreditation issues recommended that the Education Department deny NACCAS’s petition for renewed recognition “on the grounds that the agency does not comply” with several federal policies. Department staff and members of the advisory committee raised several concerns with the accreditor, including:

• The number of institutions or programs placed on probation at a given time,
• A lack of transparency when it comes to disclosing member programs’ accreditation status to students,
• Poor student outcomes like graduation rates and postgraduation earnings among member institutions,
• High tuition rates and debt levels compared to student earnings after graduation, and
• NACCAS’s decision to let programs restart the clock to resolve compliance issues each time a new error is noted.

That said, as an advisory board, NACIQI’s recommendations are not final; it will be up to Education Under Secretary Nicholas Kent to make that call.

NACCAS currently accredits more than 1,000 institutions, according to department data, and its approval allows those programs to receive federal student aid. If Kent agrees with the NACIQI recommendation, those institutions will have to find another accreditor or lose access to federal funding. If he reverts to the department’s original plan, the agency will remain recognized but be prevented from taking on new clients.

Kent didn’t speak publicly Wednesday after the committee’s vote, so it’s unclear what he’ll decide. Earlier this year, NACIQI recommended stripping recognition from the Council on Naturopathic Medical Education, but ED decided to give the agency time to fix compliance concerns.

Regardless of the final decision, one policy expert said he was pleased to see NACIQI’s recommendation, saying it signals an unwillingness to continue to see poor outcomes.

“I was super gratified to see that NACIQI was taking this vote, in part because while there’s so much conversation around how cosmetology programs aren’t actually meeting the measure, so infrequently do we see any sort of government entity acting on that,” said Jeremy Bauer-Wolf, a staff member at the left-leaning think tank New America. “There is a recognition now among folks at the highest level that these programs are not serving students.” (Bauer-Wolf has released numerous reports investigating how students fare in beauty schools.)

When the advisory committee asked department staff why its original proposal recommended a lesser penalty and whether they’d considered full denial of recognition, Bauer-Wolf recalled the staff members saying they wanted to signal concerns surrounding NACCAS but weren’t sure whether they should go further.

The majority of NACIQI members in attendance, however, argued for a higher bar. Several members said the available data on performance from NACCAS’s members is worrying and something needs to be done in response. For example, undergraduate students at just over two-thirds of NACCAS’s member institutions have lower earnings four years after graduation than adults with only a high school diploma. ED said that data raised questions about whether the accreditor’s “student achievement standards are sufficiently rigorous.”

NACCAS officials argued that ED and NACIQI were considering factors, like graduate earnings, that the accreditor did not yet have the authority to evaluate; the data available concerning graduate earnings, they added, is not accurate because it does not reflect all tips.

But the department is planning to require accreditors to set minimum earnings thresholds under new regulations that have received approval from an advisory committee and will likely be finalized by the end of the year. NACIQI member Jennifer Blum noted the expected policy change in her remarks. (Blum was one of the three who voted against the recommendation to deny NACCAS recognition. She also sat on the advisory committee that approved the new earnings regulations.)

“I get the measurement of earnings in cosmetology is imperfect,” Blum said. But “accreditation is changing and you need to keep up.”

Jeff Andrade, ED’s deputy assistant secretary for policy, planning and innovation, added that the inaccuracies NACCAS referenced involving tips “would not have significant impact.” (Cosmetology schools raised similar concerns about the accuracy of tips when commenting on a new accountability measure also based on student earnings. And while ED made a similar note that adjusting for tips would not have significant impact, in that case the department gave the schools a yearlong reprieve from any penalties.)

Still, NACCAS warned that as one of the largest cosmetology accreditors, its loss of recognition would be disruptive for students as their institutions scramble to find a new accreditor.

But many committee members didn’t buy it.

“Some of the comments I’m hearing are that this is too big to fail, and I’m not so sure,” NACIQI member Zakiya Smith Ellis said. “We need to send a signal that we aren’t just kicking the can down the road.”