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I have heard, moreso recently than in previous years, that an applicant has decided to enrol at another provider offering beauty therapy because it is less expensive than the National School of Aesthetics. Now, I’m not sure if it’s just me, but I personally would pick a provider who could offer me an excellent education and more individual attention than worry about price. (See my blog “Why Researching a School is Important” for more detail about how I feel I can talk about this subject comfortably.)
Let’s look at this logically.
Our Diploma in Beauty Therapy and Applied Aesthetics is, in 2010, $6,999.00. It’s been this price for nearly a decade at this point in time, despite inflation rising 30% in that period of time. And, we only take 10 students per class. This means, for argument’s sake, an individual pays $5.83 per hour. In addition, theoretically, 1 out of every 10 hours is spent on each individual’s training. This means each individual attending our course gains 120 hours at least focused on them and their studies in each year.
Let’s look at another provider.
Their equivalent to our Diploma in Beauty Therapy is approximately $6,000.00. They take about 18 students per class. This means an individual pays $5 per hour but 1 in every 18 hours is spent on each individual’s training. This means each individual attending that course gains 66.7 hours at least focused on them and their studies each year, which becomes 55.6% of the time we spend with each student.
Even if they take 16 per class, that’s still 75 hours focused on each student. That’s 62.5% of the time we spend with each student.
This, to me, is false economy. Sure, a person attending that provider is saving $1,000 or so (overall, 83 cents per hour), but that person is also getting a little over half the individualised attention a student of ours gets.
The question comes down to this: Do you want to be the best you can be?
If you answered “yes” to this, then you should pick the course that offers you the best chance of this by offering you more individualised tuition.
What about a provider offering a two year programme?
Well, beauty therapy (worldwide) is usually taught in a year. When some public providers got their hands on beauty therapy back in the late 1990s, the “bums-on-seats” model of training was big (the longer the student attended, the more funding the provider received from the Government), so the move was to make beauty therapy some hulk of a course.
(As both Dr. Noel Turner, our CEO, and I were involved in the unit standard and national qualifications in beauty therapy processes, and I have been involved with NaSA for nearly 14 years now, I believe I can safely say this. There were people in that process who wanted to make beauty therapy out to be something it wasn’t.)
We, and most other private beauty therapy providers who started off training beauty therapists in New Zealand, did not go down this track.
Again, the two year programme is false economy. Why? Well, why spend two years training for something that should take a year? That means that second year is spent in a classroom instead of out in the industry earning money or in the classroom with us gaining another qualification (Diploma in Spa Therapies, let’s say) to help you earn more money than a beauty therapist because you have a wider set of skills. (This improves your employment opportunities as well.)
What about a provider who is more expensive? Are they more prestigious?
Again, this comes down to number-crunching. Their equivalent to our Diploma in Beauty Therapy is approximately $11,500.00. They take about 16 students per class. This means an individual pays $9.58 per hour but 1 in every 16 hours is spent on each individual’s training. This means each individual attending that course gains 75 hours at least focused on them and their studies each year.
When the Government announced it would fully subsidise our students to the same level Government-run providers would be funded back in 2000, private training establishments (PTEs) like ours were expected to drop our course prices to reflect this. Of course, NaSA was one of the only (if not the only) beauty therapy PTE around at the time that dropped the price instead of pocketing the extra money; thus why our course went from $9,999.00 to $6,999.00 from one year to the next.
So an individual attending the more expensive beauty therapy course pays $3.75 more per hour studying with that provider yet receives 62.5% of the individualised attention one would get with us. Again, this is false economy.
Overall, I hope I’ve provided you, the reader, with some pretty compelling reasons why the National School of Aesthetics is poised to be your best choice for beauty therapy training. We are an honest PTE with our students’ successes in mind when we train them.
If you want more facts and figures about NaSA, please feel free to visit our “The Obvious Choice” page on our Web site.
As always, if you have any questions or would like further information on the National School of Aesthetics and the training we offer, please feel free to contact us, and we will be more than happy to assist you as best as we can.
Scott Fack is the Director of Operations for The National School of Aesthetics, the South Island’s leading beauty therapy, nail technology and spa therapies training provider.