Methodology
Every listing on this site is built from public, verifiable sources. Here’s exactly how.
In rough order of authority, the five sources we draw on for every school listing:
National Center for Education Statistics, U.S. Department of Education
Primary source for institution identity, address, accreditation status, and annual program completion counts by CIP code. Every school in our directory is verified against the current IPEDS Institutional Characteristics (HD) and Completions (C-A) datasets.
State agencies regulating cosmetology, barbering, CDL training, etc.
For state-licensed trades, we cross-reference each state board’s approved-school list. This is the authoritative source for whether a graduate of a given school is eligible to sit for state licensure.
ACCSC, COE, NACCAS, ABHES, regional accreditors
Used to confirm a school’s accreditation status and the accreditor’s name. We mark a school "accredited" only when the school appears in a current accreditor directory.
Each institution
Used to verify program length, credentials offered, tuition (where published), admission requirements, and schedule options. Where the school website conflicts with IPEDS, we generally trust the school for current operational details and IPEDS for institutional facts.
U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics
Used in our trade guides and city pages to describe regional wage and employment context. We do not present BLS metro-area data as guaranteed graduate outcomes.
Each school listing moves through six steps:
We start with the IPEDS HD2023 dataset to identify every active U.S. institution offering at least one program in our covered trades, filtered by CIP code family (for example, 12.04 for cosmetology, 48.05 for welding).
Closed institutions, schools with zero program completers, and non-trade institutions (e.g. PhD-granting universities offering an unrelated short course) are excluded.
For each candidate school, we check the school’s website to confirm it is operating, the program is currently offered, and the contact details match. Schools whose websites are dead or whose contact details cannot be verified are not listed.
We assemble a profile covering programs, credentials, tuition, accreditation, schedule options, and admission requirements. Where a data point is unverifiable, we mark it null rather than guess.
Each profile is reviewed by Tyler Brooks before publication. Listings include the date of our most recent verification.
We re-run the IPEDS comparison annually when new data is released, and re-verify school websites at least once every twelve months. Reader-reported corrections are reviewed within five business days.
No. Schools cannot pay for inclusion, and they cannot pay to be ranked higher in our listings. Sponsored content, if and when we publish any, will be clearly labeled as such and visually separated from editorial listings.
Within a state or city, schools are ordered primarily by annual program completers (an IPEDS metric reflecting size and continuity), with ties broken alphabetically. We do not rank by quality — we do not have the methodology to do so credibly.
We use large language models to help draft summaries, normalize messy source data, and identify candidate schools to research. Every paragraph that appears on a school profile or guide is reviewed by a member of our editorial team before publication. We do not publish unedited model output as editorial copy.
When IPEDS or a state board marks a school as closed, we remove the school from active listings. Schools that have merged are listed under their current legal name with a note about the prior name where relevant.
Where a school publishes verified outcome data (e.g. NACCAS-required disclosure rates, Gainful Employment data), we include it. Where it doesn’t, we leave the field blank rather than estimate. We do not present BLS occupational averages as graduate outcomes.
Last updated by Tyler Brooks. If you spot something incorrect on a listing, email [email protected] or use our contact form.