Educator Certification

500 clock hours. The academy publishes no week count, class hours or term calendar for this programme, so none is given here.

No start months are offered for it on the enrolment form either — that form gives month-by-month selections for Cosmetology and Esthiology only.

Over-contract hours are $10 each past your contracted graduation date — the lowest rate the academy publishes.

$5,300 in total — tuition $5,200.00, which the academy marks as including books, kit(s) and tax, plus the $100 enrolment fee. The cheapest programme the academy runs.

The academy publishes two different prices for every programme, in two of its own documents, and this page records both.

Its tuition page gives one figure per programme, marked “books and kit(s), tax included”, plus a $100 enrolment fee. Its Cost of Attendance PDF — filed under School Policies, uploaded December 2024 — gives a tuition / kit / tax breakdown adding to a different “TOTAL TUITION COSTS” for the same programmes.

Three of the four move one way and the fourth moves the other, which is why this cannot simply be a price rise. A December 2024 document undercutting the current page by $700 to $1,870 on three programmes is exactly what inflation looks like. The instructor course going the other way — the PDF double the current page — is not. Either the two documents describe different things, or one of them is stale.

The figure recorded against this programme is the tuition page’s, because that is the live page an applicant reads and the academy’s own PDF opens by reserving the right to change its figures “with or without notice”. Get the price in writing on your enrolment agreement before you sign.

Over-contract hours are charged by the hour, and the rate differs by programme: Cosmetology $11, Esthiology $16, Instructor’s Course $10, Nail Technology $12 and Barber $11 per hour past your contracted graduation date. Those are from the Cost of Attendance PDF, and they are the same document’s figures as the disputed tuition above — treat them as indicative and confirm on your agreement.

State board fees are extra and are not paid to the academy. The PDF sets them out per programme: for Cosmetology, Esthiology, Nail Technology and Barber, a $73 practical examination fee, a $130 written examination fee and a $50 licence fee — $253 in total. For the Instructor’s Course there is no practical examination, so it is $180. All licensing fees go to the New Mexico Board of Barbers and Cosmetologists and examination fees to the examination providers, and the academy notes they are subject to change at the Board’s discretion.

Federal aid. The academy publishes its Federal School Code 042716 in its own site navigation — more prominent than most schools manage — and states that financial aid received on a student’s behalf is applied to tuition first.

Other ways to pay. The academy publishes in-house financing and payment options, non-credit-based financing, and a third-party student loan application with a promo code. At the academy you may pay by cash, cheque, money order or cashier’s cheque; where an agreement permits payment after course completion, through TFC by electronic cheque, debit or credit. Any payment plan requires a signed promissory note disclosing the terms.

Falling behind has teeth. The academy states that delinquency in paying tuition “will be cause for interruption of training”; that a student may not receive a diploma unless paid in full or a satisfactory agreement is in place; and that no forms will be completed by the academy enabling a student to take the state board examinations until all academic and financial obligations have been fulfilled. That last one is the sharpest: an unpaid balance does not just withhold a certificate, it withholds your route to a licence.

The academy also publishes Annual Security Reports, an ADA policies and procedures document, an admissions policy, withdrawal and termination policies, voter registration information, a CECU HEERF fund report, retention rates and a Student Right to Know disclosure — all from its School Policies page.

$5,300 in total — $5,200 tuition, which the academy says includes books, kit(s) and tax, plus a $100 enrolment fee. Its own Cost of Attendance PDF gives a different figure; see the cost section.

The programme prepares a student to instruct in cosmetology, nails and/or esthetics, with licensure through the New Mexico Board of Barbers and Cosmetologists.

The state fees are $180 — a $130 written examination fee and a $50 licence fee. The academy’s own fee table shows no practical examination for this programme, which is why it is $73 cheaper than every other route it offers.

The obvious destination is a school like this one. The academy runs three licensure programmes and a public student salon; an instructor credential covering all three subjects is the credential that staffs it.

The academy publishes no outcome figures for this programme. Each programme page carries the sentence “Click here for the Gainful Employment Disclosure” — but on every one of them it is plain text with no link behind it, so there is nothing to click and no disclosure to read. Its School Policies page links a Retention Rates document and a Student Right to Know disclosure as Word files. No graduation, licensure or placement rate appears anywhere on the site, and none is claimed here. Ask for all three.

Settle the price before anything else. This is the one programme where the academy’s two published documents differ by nearly a factor of two — $5,200 against $10,100 — and the difference is larger than the whole tuition of its nail programme.

One campus, at 1512 Eubank Blvd NE in Albuquerque. The academy runs a student salon and, for the esthiology programme, a facial room that is open to the public for real appointments — its own description of how students prepare for the work.

It also runs guest services and sells gift cards, which is the same thing from the customer’s side: the clinic floor is a working salon that the public books into.

The academy does not publish class hours, a timetable or a term calendar on its site. Its enrolment form offers month-by-month start selections for Cosmetology and Esthiology, which implies monthly intakes for those two, but no schedule is stated and none is inferred here.

The site never names its accreditor, and the accreditor is NACCAS. Nowhere on theavenueacademy.com does the word appear, nor any accreditation claim at all. NACCAS’s own public directory lists The Avenue Academy, A Cosmetology Institute, Albuquerque, with a status of Accredited, and the U.S. Department of Education’s database lists it under NACCAS as active. That is where the accreditor on this page comes from — not from a claim on the site.

No curriculum is published for any programme. The academy gives an hour count for three of its five programmes and a paragraph of description; there is no subject-by-subject breakdown anywhere on the site, so no course rows are stored. Building one from the New Mexico regulation would be the state’s curriculum, not this school’s. Ask for the outline.

No graduation, licensure or placement rate is published either. The School Policies page links a “Retention Rates” document and a Student Right to Know disclosure, both as Word files rather than web pages; neither figure is quoted on the site itself, and none is claimed here. Ask for both.

Two things on the site point at programmes you cannot currently buy. The Master Makeup Artistry Program is priced at $11,700 on the tuition page but labelled “(Coming Soon)” in the navigation on every page of the site, so it is not recorded as a running programme here. And the Cost of Attendance PDF prices a Barber Program at $14,400 that appears nowhere in the site’s programme list, its navigation or its enquiry dropdown. Neither is ingested; both are worth asking about.