New at Reason: What’s High School Got to Do With Cutting Hair?

When Elias Zarate was in 12th grade, he dropped out of high school to help take care of his two younger siblings. It was the right decision, he says, because he had a failing GPA and was sleeping through most of his classes because he was exhausted from working two other jobs.

Leaving high school early makes life more difficult. Americans without a high school diploma are about twice as likely to be unemployed than the general population. They also earn considerably less over the course of their lifetimes.

Getting a stable, good-paying job without a high school diploma can be difficult, and the government often makes it harder. That’s a lesson Zarate learned the hard way last year. As Eric Boehm reports:

The Tennessee barber cops caught up with Elias Zarate on January 18, 2017.

Zarate was working upstairs at The Revolution Studio, a small barbershop on trendy Front Street in downtown Memphis. The job, which he had held for only a few weeks before getting busted, was like a dream come true for Zarate. He’d learned to cut hair while helping out in his uncle’s barbershop as a kid, and he had honed his skills over the years by cutting his siblings’ and friends’ hair. At Revolution, Zarate had served clientele from ordinary working-class to members of the Memphis Grizzlies, the local NBA team.

But getting that job required a state-issued license. Zarate had bought one a few months earlier from a friend “who knew a guy.” He wondered at the time if the license was legitimate, but the opportunity seemed too good—and why shouldn’t it be that easy to get a barber license?

The license, of course, was a fake. No one can just buy a license to be a barber in the State of Tennessee, or anywhere else for that matter. Obtaining one requires years of schooling, passing various exams, and the paying fees to the state Board of Cosmetology and Barber Examiners.

It also requires, weirdly, a high school diploma, despite the fact that knowledge of trigonometry and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn are not essential to being a good barber.

Zarate could not—and still cannot—get a license from the state of Tennessee, which requires barbers to have a high school diploma. It doesn’t really matter, in the end, whether Zarate was scammed into buying the fake license or whether he was aware of what he was doing. Either way, the state’s requirement that barbers must graduate from high school is equally unnecessary.

Read the whole thing here.