“Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont last month signed a law mandating that cosmetologists in the state receive training on how to cut hair in an ‘inclusive’ way,” reports Reason Magazine. “It’s about social justice,” claimed state Sen. Patricia Billie Miller (D–Stamford), who sponsored the bill:
Connecticut cosmetologists already have to complete an approved training program—including 1,500 training hours—to receive their licenses. That is nearly 40 times the amount of training time required to earn a private pilot’s license or a driver’s license in the state….
With the passage of this bill, [Connecticut] becomes the third state to implement “inclusive” hair legislation, joining Minnesota and New York. The latter already requires 1,000 hours of training to become a cosmetologist. Some states mandate more than 2,000 hours.
The cosmetology license requirement is one of 145 such requirements that Connecticut imposes, according to research conducted last year by the Archbridge Institute.
“Right now, hairstylists in Connecticut need almost a year of education before they can work at their trade,” Darwyyn Deyo, a professor of economics at San Jose State University, tells Reason. “…SB 178 could also make it harder for aspiring hairstylists to afford their training by increasing the cost of education.”
Research from the Institute for Justice, published in November 2022, found that “too many licensing burdens are excessively onerous or entirely unnecessary” because “red tape forces aspiring workers to waste time and money or, worse yet, shuts them out of work.”
It is dumb for states to require hairstylists to attend beauty school, rather than just getting on-the-job training. Hairstylists don’t need hundreds of hours of training at a beauty school to do their jobs properly. But states require that anyway, as a condition for hairstylists being allowed to work.
Back in the 1950s, most states didn’t require hairstylists to get a license before they could cut people’s hair. Just 4 percent of Americans needed a license to work in 1950. Now, 30 percent of Americans need a occupational license to work.
Matt Yglesias describes how “beauty schools are ripping off their students. Terrible licensing rules deserve some of the blame.” He cites a New York Times article “about beauty schools that leave their students drowning in debt rather than opening up” job opportunities, thanks to “occupational licensing” rules.
To cut hair in New York state, you need to graduate from barber school. The number of hours of barber schooling you need is “determined by the approved NYS barber schools.” . . if you’ve been cutting hair in New Jersey and want to move your practice to the other side of the Hudson, that license is no good. Do New Yorkers whose kids go off to college in other states warn them about the dangers of Connecticut or California or Massachusetts barbers? Not in my experience, but the state of the New York takes the official view that the regulatory requirements in 46 states (and the District of Columbia) are not up to snuff.
As Yglesias points out, mandatory-school-attendance requirements for barbers and hair-stylists make no sense. Indeed, such attendance requirements make no sense even for occupations where public safety is at issue and some form of licensing may thus be justified (comically, defenders of beauty-school attendance mandates depict hair-styling as being a dangerous occupation where licensing is needed due to the presence of chemicals in hair treatments). As he notes, it makes more sense to require competency to be shown
purely through certification. In other words: You need to be able to pass the test. In that world, a beauty school can stay in business if and only if it offers a cost-effective training regime. Beauty schools would need to compete with efforts at self-instruction or with apprenticeship arrangements of various kinds. Instead, by requiring the 1,000 hours of training, the state licensing board creates a cozy business for the beauty schools. They become for-profit gatekeepers to economic opportunity. And their incentive structure isn’t to focus on effective education—the quality of the teaching is irrelevant to the business model. It’s to focus on maximizing the amount of money extracted from the students.
Many occupations that are now licensed do not need to be licensed to protect anyone. And the few that do, tend to have excessive requirements for getting a license:
“Licensing is a barrier to entry for all Americans looking for work in certain professions, but it’s particularly pernicious for those on the lower end of the economic ladder. For example, getting a license to cut hair can require more than a year of expensive schooling in some states, while becoming an interior designer in places like Florida requires more than 2,000 days (yes, days!) of training. There’s little evidence that licensing those professions does much of anything to protect public health and safety.
“Once you have a license, you might be stuck in the state where you earned it. A 2015 study by the Brookings Institution found that licensed workers were less likely to migrate between states, but not necessarily because people are happy in those places. Instead, researchers say workers feel locked in place because most state-issued professional licenses are not transferable, so moving out-of-state means you’d be out of business unless you can obtain a new license in your new home.”
The harm from many occupational licensing regulations is so obvious that even the Obama administration, which was usually pro-regulation, recognized it. “During the Obama administration, the Department of Labor and the White House Council of Economic Advisers published a lengthy report on licensing laws, and called for states to take action to remove unnecessary barriers to work. ‘Licensing restrictions cost millions of jobs nationwide and raise consumer expenses by over one hundred billion dollars,’ it concluded.”
The Trump administration also recognized the harm of occupational licensing, saying that “the cost and complexity of licensing creates an economic barrier for Americans seeking a job” and “a barrier for Americans that move from state to state.” Excessive occupational licensing also drives up the rate of theft and property crimes by increasing joblessness.
