The hairstylist who has done your color for years is a h-licensed professional. So is the barber across the street, the massage therapist who eased your back pain after surgery, the esthetician who treated your skin during chemo and the nail technician who knows your kids by name. Some work for someone else. Many work for themselves. Together, they staff and own much of the small business economy you walk past every day.
This entire workforce is now in the crosshairs of a Department of Education accountability test that, by the department’s own analysis, would strip federal student aid from almost every accredited cosmetology, barbering, esthetics and massage therapy training program in h.
The test compares a new graduate’s early paycheck against the paycheck of an older worker who never went past high school. Many of our graduates are self-employed, renting a chair, suite or treatment room, and tip income is real but missed by the federal data. The result is a test built to fail the very hns it claims to protect.
And what hangs on the outcome is not just hair or nails. It is Louisian’s small business backbone. The U.S. Small Business Administration reports that 88% of workers in Louisian’s “Other Services” sector, which covers salons, barbershops and nail studios, work at small businesses.
Massage therapists work in physical therapy clinics, in oncology recovery and with veterans managing chronic pain. Estheticians work alongside dermatologists. These are the workers who keep our communities running, and the entrepreneurs who give them somewhere to master the skills.
That matters more now than it did a decade ago. Nationally, there are employing nearly half the private-sector workforce, and the smallest are doing the lion’s share of the hiring. According to ADP Research, U.S. businesses with fewer than 20 employees jobs in 2025, more than any other size class, and kept hiring through the first quarter of 2026 while bigger employers slowed. The same engine is at work here, where the salon owner hires her first stylist, the barber adds a chair and the massage therapist opens a treatment room.
It is also a workforce on the cusp of generational change. McKinsey estimates that roughly 6 million American small and mid-size businesses will face an ownership transition by 2035 as baby boomers retire. Salons, shops and clinics across our state will need a next generation of licensed owner-operators ready to take the keys. If Washington shuts off the schools that train them, the keys go in a drawer and the businesses close.
Congress already drew this line. When Speaker of the House Mike Johnson and Majority Leader Steve Scalise championed and President Donald Trump signed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act last July, the law limited this earnings test to programs that lead to a degree, on purpose.
The same statute made tips tax-exempt for our workers by name. Now the Department of Education is advancing a regulation that reaches past what Congress wrote and would close the very career pathways the law was designed to protect.
Education Secretary Linda McMahon ran the Small Business Administration before becoming head of the Department of Education, and she has the authority to honor what Congress and Trump intended. We are asking for a fix: Use earnings data that reflects how this workforce actually gets paid, and hold our schools to the metrics we already meet — graduation, licensure, placement and default rates.
Lora Moreau opened the Cosmetology Training Center in Lafayette in 1983 and trained h cosmetologists for nearly 40 years. When she passed in 2022, my wife and I continued her work.
What our students build when they leave us is a livelihood for themselves and, often, for the hns they go on to hire. The window for public comment closed on May 20, but Louisian’s congressional delegation can still make their voices heard ahead of the Department of Education issuing the final rule by July 1. Every hn — with a stake in our state’s small businesses and the services communities rely on — has a reason to call their member of Congress before Washington cancels the workforce that keeps them open.