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Education entrepreneurship provides many opportunities for creative expression. Filling out the annual application for postsecondary career school licensing is not one of them.
I almost cry when the packet comes in the mail each spring.
The first time was the hardest, in 2011. I had launched my school, Faces Etc of MN, four years earlier as a Minneapolis training center for beauty professionals serious about careers in makeup artistry.
The Minnesota Office of Higher Education hardly paid attention. They treated me like a piano or karate instructor giving in-home lessons. But the level of scrutiny spiked when I decided to formalize my enterprise as a postsecondary career school to better reflect my mission and to validate the hard work of my students.
The state then wanted a course catalog, financial records, inspection reports, proof of insurance, policy statements and audit letters. Universities have finance, accounting, human resources and legal offices to gather this data. I had me.
When I asked the state for guidance, regulators told me to read the statutes and figure things out. It took hundreds of hours. When I was not in the classroom teaching, I was working on the packet.