By Eric Ries, Techniques Contributing Editor

You’d expect to find the teens at South Garland High School—a 2,000-student comprehensive high school located just northeast of Dallas, grappling with such tough academic subjects as chemistry, geometry, physics and biology. You’d anticipate finding instruction in everything from English and communication skills to such vocational applications as electrical properties and basic wiring. You’d foresee alumni going on to successful careers as tradespeople, white-collar professionals, artists, even business owners.

What you might not expect, however, is for all those subjects to be taught in one classroom, by one instructor, and for graduates of this one program to have achieved such a diversity of career success.

But the real shocker—particularly to those who believe students must graduate from a four-year college to get ahead in life—is that the place in question is La Quita Brantley’s cosmetology lab.

You heard right. Cosmetology. As in hairdressers. As in graduates of "beauty school"—one of three major pathways to the profession. We’re talking about a career field personified in pop culture by the slow-witted, perpetually bare-midriff’d niece on the TV cartoon series "King of the Hill."

"The dumb blonde, the sleazy blonde, the loose blonde," Lynda Colley, a high school cosmetology instructor in Ohio, wearily sums up. "A lot of people won’t let their children become hairdressers."

At South Garland High, however, cosmetology commands respect. There, Brantley’s dedication is legendary, her results documented in the banners and trophies that dot her classroom, and her success at spurring young people to postsecondary studies impressive.

The cosmetology program she started at her alma mater 23 years ago has produced two national VICA skills competition winners—a gold and a silver medalist—in the past three years, one of whom was the United States’ cosmetology representative to the Youth Skill Olympics in Switzerland last summer. Brantley estimates that as many as 50 of her former students now own their own salons, and that roughly 90 percent of her graduates annually further their schooling—going on to junior college or a four-year institution to pursue teaching goals, or using their cosmetology license to work their way through school while majoring in another subject.

The state-mandated, 1,500-hour, two-year program she leads—requiring mastery of 19 different skills in basic hairdressing alone, from "air waving " and "comb-outs" to weaving and wigs—is far beyond the abilities of gum-chewing dummies, Brantley notes with impatience. It requires knowledge of bacteriology to properly sanitize equipment, electricity to clear up skin disorders, geometry to cut hair with precision.

A faculty colleague recently asked Brantley what her students would be doing in class that day, she recalls.

"I said, ‘We’re learning chemistry. You take the basics of chemistry, then you turn that knowledge around and apply it to your hair-coloring product. You learn what the product actually does [chemically], then you apply it to your client.’ I think a lot of people are surprised by everything that’s involved in this field."

But then cosmetology is full of surprises. Stereotyped as a field of low wages and dead-end jobs, the reality is something altogether different. Cosmetology rated 37th among Money magazine’s "Fifty Hottest Jobs" in 1995, a designation bestowed on the "fastest-growing, most desirable job fields in the nation." Its ranks are swelled with success stories who own profitable salons, have risen to executive positions in the industry or have built up lucrative clienteles while remaining "behind the chair" as working cosmetologists. And it’s a field where, by many accounts, there are more jobs than qualified people to fill them.

It’s an occupation that offers a plethora of possibilities, says Shelby Kilpatrick—a cosmetology instructor and VICA advisor at Bevill State Community College in Sumiton, Alabama, who also has taught high school cosmetology and owned her own salons over the course of 30-plus years in the field, beginning at age 17.

"I saw this as a means to accomplish what I wanted out of life, and I have just drained it for everything [I could gain from it]," Kilpatrick says. "It’s been wonderful in my personal experience. It’s brought me from poor little country girl to pretty good [financial] shape. And it’s an ‘up’ profession. It makes [clients] feel better about themselves, and when they feel better you feel better."

Cosmetologists held 736,000 jobs in the U.S. economy in 1996, according to the U.S. Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics. While there are no definitive figures on the routes those workers took to their careers in cosmetology, a paper trail of sorts provides some answers.

Gordon Miller is president of Milady Publishing, an Albany, New York, company that publishes The Standard Textbook of Cosmetology—generally considered the field’s instructional bible. Based on where Milady sells the book—and allowing for the fact that high schools buy new copies only once every five years or so—Miller estimates that about 65 percent of all cosmetology students enroll in private beauty schools, perhaps 15 percent take high school courses and the remaining 20 percent attend postsecondary programs at technical schools and community colleges. (In some states, students start cosmetology studies in high school but must go on to the postsecondary level to complete them.)

Milady’s sales suggest gradually declining enrollments, Miller says—from a high of about 220,000 textbooks sold seven or eight years ago to about 160,000 copies last year. He cites two reasons for the drop: basic demographics, with fewer young people in the general population; and a government crackdown on fraud in the beauty school ranks that ushered in expensive new accountability requirements that have shut the doors of many operations, shady and legitimate alike. In fact, the National Accrediting Commission of Cosmetology Arts & Sciences—by far the largest accrediting body of private beauty schools—listed 1,073 accredited schools last July 1, compared with 1,700 schools five years earlier.

While even anecdotal readings on postsecondary trends are elusive, VICA’s experience suggests cosmetology enrollment is holding its own at the high school level. Tim Lawrence, director of business and industry partnerships at the national VICA office, calls it "a popular program with students" and notes that VICA membership among youth enrolled in high school cosmetology programs rose slightly from the 1995-96 to the 1996-97 school year—from 18,452 to 18,767. Lawrence estimates that more than 50 percent of all high school cosmetology students are VICA members and believes overall enrollment in the program, offered in school districts in 35 states, is "probably increasing."

Whatever their educational route, cosmetology graduates must then pass their state’s licensing exam for cosmetology, which tests both book knowledge and hands-on skills. After that, they’re ready to enter a challenging but potentially rewarding career field.

For all their cheerleading about the field, even cosmetology’s biggest fans concede that the beginning pay for most newcomers stinks. Salon chains typically pay minimum wage or close to it. Many smaller salons offer a seemingly generous commission of 50 to 60 percent per customer—but with the sobering catch that beginning cosmetologists typically have no established clientele.

"When these students start out they’re making hardly anything," says Colley, a cosmetology instructor and VICA advisor at Scioto County Joint Vocational School in Lucasville, Ohio. "Usually they’re below poverty [level]."

Not only that, but the types of benefits entry-level workers in many other professions take for granted—such as health insurance and paid vacations—may well be absent. And starting hours are typically irregular and long.

"Sometimes it is better to go into McDonald’s than to go into the salon," admits Nabil Ghali, co-owner of Nancy Flinn Marketing Resources, a Stamford, Connecticut company that conducts market research for the beauty industry.

The BLS estimates that the median annual salary of all full-time cosmetologists—veterans and newcomers alike—was only $15,200 in 1996.

Cosmetology’s champions point out, however, that the government figure extrapolates the low wages of the industry’s sizable contingent of part-time workers to determine what they’d earn were they working 40 hours a week. And, anyway, never mind the meager starting pay, loyalists agree: there’s plenty of money to be made by those who persevere.

"You have to pay your way in any job to advance," notes Larry Oskin, president of Marketing Solutions, a Fairfax, Virginia, marketing firm with many beauty industry clients. "You may start out making in the teens, [but] if you stay in one place and stay there a good number of years, it’s not impossible to make a six-figure income in the beauty business today."

NACCAS puts the average salary for full-time salon cosmetologists at $32,000, based on a survey of 28,000 salons the accrediting organization commissioned in 1996. While some people contacted for this article thought that figure high, they agreed with Colley that such a sum would be typical for a hairdresser in a cosmopolitan area with five to 10 years of experience.

If low starting wages and the lure of much bigger paychecks are characteristic of cosmetology as a career field, the following are some other traits that shape the profession:

With an explosion in the number of chain salons, the popularity of high-end establishments that offer clients cappucino with their coifs, and the emergence of nail work and skin care as lucrative specialties, "looking good" would seem to describe not only the appearance of those cosmetology serves but the job outlook for incoming hairdressers.

In fact, the BLS forecasts 17 percent growth and 275,000 jobs in the field through the year 2005. The NACCAS-commissioned survey paints an even rosier picture, estimating a whopping 510,000 unfilled salon positions in 1996 alone. The jobs-for-all bandwagon has one notable absentee, however: the General Accounting Office, which last summer charged that private beauty schools are training students for an occupation that is vastly oversupplied—with job seekers exceeding openings by as much as 100 percent in some states.

But Ronald Smith, president of the American Association of Cosmetology Schools, has blasted the GAO report as methodologically flawed and out of touch with reality. And other beauty industry figures—and, significantly, top employers—back him up.

"Cosmetology currently has a crisis at hand, in that there is zero unemployment because there are not enough licensed cosmetologists," Oskin says flatly.

The nonprofit Cosmetology Advancement Foundation is sufficiently concerned about worker shortage that it has developed a role model program that sends volunteers into high schools to promote careers in cosmetology.

"There are huge opportunities in our business," Mark Kartarik, chief operating officer of the Supercuts salon chain, concurs. He notes, for example, that the Minneapolis-based Regis Corporation—parent of Supercuts, Regis Hairstylists, MasterCuts, Wal-Mart salons and Trade Secret—owned 2,870 salons as of last June, compared with the 1,696 salons that were owned by Regis Corporation and Supercuts five years earlier (before Regis acquired Supercuts).

The more salons there are, the more opportunities for ambitious cosmetologists to rise through the managerial ranks, Kartarik adds. That was the career path taken by Paula Killingsworth, manager of salon styling systems for JC Penney, which operates nearly 1,000 salons.

"Myself, the buyer and the assistant buyer in this office started out in a Penney salon as a stylist years back and have worked our way up through management positions at the store and regional levels," Killingsworth says by phone from the retail giant’s corporate headquarters in Plano, Texas.

At South Garland High, Brantley is doing her part to feed the industry professional recruits. On this day, she’s patrolling the classroom, clipboard in hand, as her first-year students give each other manicures. Each work station is meticulously organized for efficiency and hygiene, with nail polish, remover, cotton swabs and other supplies in precise order.

"You’ve got to get in the habit of wiping the cuticle on the cotton, because that’s what they’re going to be looking for at state board," she gently admonishes one student as the harsh fluorescent light reflects off her half-glasses.

That afternoon, her second-year students apply perms to each other or to one of many disembodied mannequin heads that lend cosmetology lab the air of a Halloween party or slasher film waiting to happen. One youth is completing an intricate procedure she’d begun the previous day.

"You could probably charge three or four hundred dollars for this perm [in a salon]," Brantley says as the student smiles proudly.

For proof that cosmetology can literally take them places in life, these teens need look no further than to Brantley’s assistant instructor, 1996 South Garland graduate Monica Marsh. It was she who represented her country in the 1997 Youth Skill Olympics in Switzerland, finishing 17th out of 32 contestants. Marsh’s classmates and schoolmates—with help from the state, Texas VICA and autographed baseballs from native son Nolan Ryan—raised $10,000 to send her and Brantley overseas last summer.

"It was a great experience," says Marsh. Now she is "doing really well" working full-time at a local Supercuts, where her speed brings production bonuses, and earning hours toward a private school instructor’s license through her work at South Garland.

Two additional role models have come by this day to see Brantley and talk to Techniques—1995 South Garland graduates Alisha Manes and Nancy Fuller. Manes now works full-time for a salon and does some substitute high school teaching, while Fuller manages a salon.

"I was just talking to a guy who told me I’m making more money than a lot of his friends who have college degrees," Fuller relates.

All three young women—Marsh, Manes and Fuller—have career goals that will require additional formal or informal education. Fuller aspires to climb the salon industry’s corporate ladder. Both Marsh and Manes hope to follow in Brantley’s footsteps as high school cosmetology teachers.

Nothing could please their mentor more.

"Go and learn," Brantley emphasizes. "Never stop learning, because in every field of cosmetology there is always something new and exciting going on."

LeeAnn Nelbach remembers well her parents’ and guidance counselors’ reactions when she decided to enroll in high school cosmetology. It was almost as if, in those volatile years at the end of the Vietnam War, she had announced her intention to tune in, turn on and drop out.

"Nobody wanted me to do it," Nelbach recalls. "They said my grades were too good, I should be going to college, all those crazy things."

Far from throwing away her future, however, she went on to become a successful hairstylist and opened her own salon only eight years after high school graduation. That business, appropriately named The Kindest Cut, now employs more than 20 people and will soon add such spa services as body wraps and massage after moving to a larger space near her current salon in Springfield, Virginia.

Janice Morchower’s academic prospects weren’t nearly so promising as Nelbach’s when Morchower was drifting through high school in Garland, Texas, a few years later. She was a self-described likely dropout when she enrolled in cosmetology. But, to her surprise, the program gave her the skills, confidence and self-esteem that put her "on a road that has led me to where I am today."

Geographically, that’s only five miles from where she started. But where she is in life is a world apart from where she was once headed. Now the proud owner of The Clipper Ship Hair Company and still styling hair, she’s doing work she loves and earning enough money to comfortably support two teenagers as a single mother.

Nelbach and Morchower are just two of the thousands of people Tom Holdsworth, director of postsecondary/college programs at the national VICA office, is talking about when he calls cosmetology "the perfect opportunity for an entrepreneur."

Dan Mason concurs. The owner of Maison Hair Design in Alexandria, Virginia, has parlayed his hairdressing skills into an enviable lifestyle, with a townhouse in the city, a second home on the Delaware shore and as much vacation time as he wants to give himself—about seven weeks last year, he says. But to attain his level of success, he advises, required not only years of hard and physically taxing work—"It’s tough staying on your feet all day, especially as you get older"—but a serious gut check as well.

When he signed the lease on his first salon, Mason relates with a now-I-can-laugh-about-it smile, "I had to go and have a stiff drink because I felt like I was having a nervous breakdown." Yet he dug in and "just stayed at it. I think anything you want to succeed in you can," he says, "as long as you put forth the work."

And as long as you’re committed to lifelong learning, David Cohen appends. Cohen, whose David’s Beautiful People in Rockville, Maryland, employs 38 people, was getting ready for an overseas trip when Techniques contacted him—jetting first to London for an international hairstyling show, then to check out the latest techniques at the Institute of Cosmetology and Laser Surgery in Moscow.

"If you want to aim high, then you have to think about education, education, education," Cohen holds. "If you keep on reinvesting in your education all things will come to you."

Randy Currie, who opened his first salon nearly 20 years ago with $12,000 scraped together from hairdressing earnings, now owns Currie Hair, Skin & Nails—a 7,000-square-foot, 67-employee business located in an upscale shopping center in suburban Philadelphia. He agrees that successful entrepreneurship in cosmetology requires love for the work, willingness to put in long hours and a continuing thirst for knowledge. But Currie, who made a point of working in the Philadelphia area’s best salons while he cut and styled his way to the top, offers this additional advice for those starting out in the field:

"I think the best thing to do is to try to place yourself around successful people," he says. "You want to try to work in the most successful salon in your area and learn everything that person has to offer you. If you see someone who’s successful and you pattern yourself after them, then nine chances out of 10 you’ll also be successful."

"President Clinton has said for a long time, ‘Create jobs.’ Well, I’m creating jobs—for all the hairdressers who want to go out and do as many services as possible, for everyone," says Noella Charest-Papagno with pride.

But you won’t find the kinds of jobs Charest-Papagno strives to create in the Cosmetology Advancement Foundation’s slick recruiting brochure, Your Future Should Be Beautiful. That pamphlet lists "stage artist," "artistic director" and "makeup artist in film" as some of the many exciting options for licensed cosmetologists.

Charest-Papagno champions offshoots of the trade that hold no such glamour but that, she says, offer cosmetologists additional sources of income and are sorely needed on humanitarian grounds as well. The books she writes and the certification programs she offers encourage cosmetologists to look to hospitals and even funeral homes for new clients. She has gone so far as to coin terms—"cosmecare" and "desairology" (from the words "deceased" and "hair")—to describe the brave new worlds she has been carving out since she first published her Handbook of Desairology for Cosmetologists Servicing Funeral Homes in 1980.

That book, now in its fifth printing, has sold 4,200 copies in the years since, and was joined in print last year by Cosmetology Specialties for the Bedridden Patient. Both books carry forewords by former congressman and 1980 independent candidate for president John Anderson, a salon customer of Charest-Papagno’s who describes her in the books as a deeply caring professional whose work raises the spirits of the bedridden by helping them look their best and brings "genuine comfort to countless family members and friends of those who have departed this life."

Her books, marketed through classified ads in salon magazines, are detailed how-to manuals with headings such as "Planning for the Bedridden," "Universal Precautions," "Preparing the Patient," "The Family, the Funeral Home, the Desairologist" and "The Mortuary Cosmetic Kit." Cosmetologists possessing such skills can significantly enhance their incomes—and potentially even carve out niche careers—by taking on hospital patients as clients and contracting with funeral homes, Charest-Papagno says. And they can charge more than the going salon rates, she adds, because they provide a commodity that is in short supply—professional hairstyling and makeup in venues where such services are seldom performed by people who are licensed in the field.

But to Charest-Papagno, a semi-retiree who says her books net her little profit, financial remuneration isn’t the only reason cosmetologists should seek out the sick and help prepare the deceased for viewing. It’s also, to her way of thinking, the right thing to do.

Charest-Papagno was only 18 and working at a salon in her native Rhode Island when she was asked to do the hair of a deceased woman at the funeral home across the street. The idea unnerved her at first, she says, "but then I reached for the comb and started to comb her hair, and, oh my God, I just went right into it." On another occasion soon after, she overheard a crying woman marveling at how "beautiful" Charest-Papagno had made her deceased mother look.

"I never got that picture out of my mind—how important [this service] is [for the family]," Charest-Papagno says.

It’s also important, she adds, that bedridden patients have the opportunity to look their best. Often, she notes, the best such patients can hope for is a quick hair-washing from a harried nurse.

After many years as a salon hairdresser and presenter at industry trade shows, Charest-Papagno—who holds an associate degree in medical assisting technology—continues to cut and style hair two days a week at a salon near her Hollywood, Florida, home, works occasionally for a local funeral home and writes books. Upcoming guides include "an HIV/AIDS update for salon professionals" and a handbook for estheticians and nail technicians servicing bedridden patients, she says.

She concedes there’s less potential income in desairology than in cosmecare because the volume of business at most funeral homes is too small for much work. Still, she’d like to see every licensed cosmetologist try that particular service.

"Whenever I walk out of the funeral home I get a terrific high because I know I took care of the grieving family," she says. "Every hairdresser should do this at least once."