We compared educational institutions from the Beauty Schools Directory database of beauty programs across the U.S. Those analyzed for these rankings were educational institutions that:

Report into the U.S. Department of Education’s Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS)—predominantly institutions with programmatic accreditation
Had 50 or more students over the course of 12 months as of 2022
Were not a vocational/technical high school, community college, or postsecondary school that mainly offered programs outside of beauty training. We also excluded institutions offering massage therapy programs exclusively. These types of institutions were omitted for various reasons that make key data points difficult or irrelevant to compare apples to apples. We intended to compare standalone beauty schools or schools that mainly train beauty students.
For this ranking, “graduation rate within 150% of normal completion time of the program” was chosen as the variable, because beauty education caters to many nontraditional postsecondary students who often have life reasons that interfere with graduation within 100% of normal completion time. Institutions with such a graduation rate of less than 50% were omitted from the ranking.

Data was sourced from 2022, the latest available as of publication date.