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The Corporate Takeover of Massage

Perhaps you have seen some of the many articles about the impact of for-profit schools on people and on taxpayers. The New York Times just wrote another one recently.

Not that long ago, massage therapy was loosely regulated in most states. Industry leaders, composed of massage school owners, the AMTA (American Massage Therapy Associates), COMTA (the school accrediting company) and NCBTMB (the testing company) joined forces to hire lobbyists to create regulations. Essentially they went across the country state by state to impose tough regulations. In Massachusetts they hired Lynch Associates lobbying firm. Their lobbyist attends most of the massage board meetings.

Why did they do this? Altruism? Activism? To protect the people? Hardly. Moneyed interests created a system to assure their profits: Laws restricting who can be a massage therapist, who can teach massage therapists, and who can get federal financial aid.

Very recently, Vermont's legislature repulsed the efforts of the corporate interests, ruling that the potential for harm by massage therapists is "remote and speculative." In many states however, the corporate interests were successful in raising the bar very high by requiring that schools be accredited and graduates get tested. That seems benign enough on the surface. After all, an accredited school is a good school, right? And a student that passes a written exam is a good massage therapist, right? It protects students from bad schools and the public from bad therapists, right?

Consider this. To become accredited costs a school about $40,000, with annual renewal in the tens of thousands. COMTA is a private company with a near-monopoly on accrediting massage schools. You have to pay them their cut if you want to offer your students federal financial aid. That is how the big money people set it up. The magic number of school hours that maximizes the amount schools can get from federal financial aid is 650 hours.

So, accredited schools can charge high tuitions and get paid by federal financial aid. This has led to rampant abuse by for-profit schools, called predatory recruiting: Schools inflate students’ expectation of future income and convince them to apply for federal financial aid. The schools are paid up front. Then, when the student doesn’t earn what s/he thought and can’t make the loan payments, the taxpayer is left holding the bag, and the student is left with ruined credit.

One can argue that all these players form a cartel that maximizes profit and minimizes competition at the expense of the people.

It is happening in many industries, not just massage. If you google “for-profit education” you will find many, many articles describing the injustices done to unsuspecting, hard-working people just trying to get ahead. The system does a great job of getting their money and making them jump through excessive hoops. Then it leaves them broke, distraught and bearing the burden of tens of thousands of dollars in loans to pay back or ruining their credit.

I saw the injustice of this system years ago when I wanted to be a massage therapist. I saw that the system works well enough for some people: people with money, people with wealthy parents, and people with supportive spouses. But those people already have many options. If you are someone who is raising children alone, someone who doesn’t make much money, or someone who can’t do some of the unnecessarily tough science classes, you’re out of luck. The system won’t work for you, unless you are willing to sign on the dotted line for a loan that you are told you will be able to pay back, because you will be making so much money. Single parents, minorities, and people for whom English is a second language are especially hurt by this system.

The accrediting and testing companies are privately owned organizations, not government regulatory bodies. Almost monopolies, they are a part of the racket, designed to profit from the industry. Even though COMTA is a “non-profit”, it pays its executives handsome salaries. I know a woman who owns many trade schools as a “non-profit” simply because that is a good business model, and maximizes her income.

This predatory system so angered me that I joined forces with a physical therapist, Alexei Levine, and opened a massage school for the people. We are in our tenth year. We chose not to be accredited, and we pass the savings on to our students. We give scholarships generously, and we have done everything we can to make this education available to people from all walks of life. We have a pay-as-you-go program, and we never take a penny from anyone until we have earned it. We charge about one quarter of what the big corporate schools charge for tuition. Our students leave here not owing anything to the government.

The actions of massage boards across the country, headed by owners of big massage schools, have put many small independent schools out of business by raising requirements unnecessarily high and making the costs prohibitive for the small school owners. To us this constitutes a conflict of interest.

Small schools like ours should be protected from the big corporate forces, which have the resources to put their competition out of business by manipulating the legislative process.

We hear about the same thing happening in the childcare industry. The big moneyed interests are hiring lobbyists to pass onerous rules that are putting the small day care providers out of business. Who would you rather have watching your kids, the mom down the street who cares about her neighbors’ children, or some big corporate day care provider who hires caretakers at minimum wage? As always, it is the small operators and the public who are harmed, despite the assurances of the big guys that they are doing it for the “public good.”

Many of my students are single mothers. After nine years of teaching them, and being one myself, I can tell you that no one works harder or deserves a break more than a single mom who wants to make a better life for herself and her kids. When my beloved Barack Obama talked about his vision that “I am my brother’s keeper,” we at The Massage School said, “I am my sister’s leg up to a better life.” We help them to achieve that better life without backbreaking loans to pay back.

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Comment by Alexei Levine on February 22, 2011 at 9:09pm: Jan, with all due respect (I'm still grateful to you for the Mr. Thrifty suggestion when teaching the muscles through clay modeling) to say that Valerie's statements are not factual is just wishful thinking on your part. Accreditation is an expensive process that costs the massage students thousands of dollars, and makes school owners and accrediting agencies lots of money. We are school owners, we know. We offer a high quality 800 hour program in massage therapy for $3,600. How do we do this? By choosing not to be accredited. We've crunched the numbers and If we were to pursue accreditation our students would have to pay almost triple what they do now.

Comment by Jan Schwartz on February 22, 2011 at 8:54pm: Clearly this is a discussion was started amongst people who do not see, nor want to see, the value in accreditation. MA may have different rules, but I didn't know we were talking about one state. Yes, ABHES and NACCAS can accredit other programs, but they are still specialized accreditors for massage therapy, just as COMTA can accredit Asian Bodywork and is applying to expand it's scope to skin care/esthetician programs (they may already have that approval). Accrediting agencies don't just pop up out of the earth. The massage field asked for it's own accreditor through the Council of Schools and it was formed--not to make money, but to serve the massage community of schools. Again, it's voluntary. The Board of Directors determines the salary of the ED and the ED of COMTA does not make the kind of money that other EDs n our field make-not even close. We can nit pick this to death and always have it come out the way we want it to. My point is that making broad statements that are not factual is not helpful.

Comment by Alexei Levine on February 22, 2011 at 8:31pm: In our state, Massachusetts, we were given a list by the state of only 7 accreditors that could be used. For proprietary school purposes regional and other accreditors are not legally "accreditors". ABHES and NACCAS accredit many other types of schools than massage schools, COMTA is the only accrediting agency which is dedicated to massage alone. There are several states where accreditation is required, not voluntary for massage schools, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Maryland I think. There may be others I'm unaware of. 650 hours is considered the magic number because the school can have the best profit percentage at that point; we were educated on that point by the owner of a chain of 5 massage schools who explained it to us. To say that accrediting agencies don't benefit from accreditation is fatuous at best, as they wouldn't exist without it. A private company can be non-profit. Although profit making is not their "mission", many non profits provide sweet jobs to their executives. Look at the heads of AMTA and the NCBMT, who both make between 200 and 300 thousand dollars a year.

Comment by Jan Schwartz on February 22, 2011 at 8:13pm: There are 6 regional accreditors, numerous national accreditors and many specialized accreditors, all approved by USDE to be gatekeepers for Title IV. I don't know exactly how many there are, but it's lots more than 7! In addition to COMTA there is ABHES and NACCAS, both of which are specialized and institutional accreditors for massage therapy programs. Where does the monopoly comes from? There are hundreds of accredited massage therapy programs/schools--COMTA has one hundred or less of them. Accreditation is voluntary--no school has to do it, and if they are in a state that requires it (few and far between), they have a choice in agencies. To say that 650 hours maximizes the profits makes no sense. It's the school and the student who benefit from Title IV, not accreditors. If a school wants to get the most Federal funding for their students they go to credits, not hours. And no 501c3 that I know of has the mission of profit making.

Comment by Alexei Levine on February 22, 2011 at 7:43pm: Jan, Valerie's numbers include what the school would have to pay administrators within the school to do the necessary work for accreditation (costs which would be passed on to the student). COMTA is a private company as it is not publicly traded. A non-profit can still be a private corporation, a public corporation has shares which are traded on a stock exchange. 600 hours is the minimum number of hours necessary to gain accreditation and federal funds, but 650 hours maximizes the profits. As COMTA is the only accrediting agency dedicated to massage schools they do have a near monopoly. If I remember the number correctly there are only 7 federally recognized accrediting agencies of any type which can enable a school to get federal funds.

Comment by Jan Schwartz on February 22, 2011 at 5:56pm: There is a lot wrong with this post, but I will only focus on one paragraph as an example:

"Consider this. To become accredited costs a school about $40,000, with annual renewal in the tens of thousands. COMTA is a private company with a near-monopoly on accrediting massage schools. You have to pay them their cut if you want to offer your students federal financial aid. That is how the big money people set it up. The magic number of school hours that maximizes the amount schools can get from federal financial aid is 650 hours."

I speak as a former Chair of COMTA. Of course it depends on the size of the school, but it does not cost $40,000 to get initial accreditation. Annual renewal is not in the 10s of thousands of dollars. COMTA is not a private company, it is a 501c3, originally formed with the help of the AMTA (American Massage Therapy Association, not Associates), as desired by the membership. AMTA is also a non-profit, not a private company. COMTA hardly has a monopoly on accreditation. It accredits about 100 schools and programs out of about 600 - 700 accredited massage schools and programs. It is a US Dept. of Education rule that schools be accredited in order to participate in Title IV funds. The accreditors didn't make that up--they are merely the gatekeepers by law. The "magic" number is 600 hours, not 650 hours--also set by the US Dept of Education.

It's ok to have opinions, but to misstate facts is irresponsible. All accreditors are pretty transparent with standards, policies and fees on their websites--it's pretty easy to fact check.

Comment by Alexei Levine on February 15, 2011 at 7:50am: Daniel,

If you read the regulation you will see that it is not required to go to an accredited school in the state of California. The school has to be approved by the BPPE (the CA Bureau of Private Postsecondary Education, which is not an accrediting agency), which all massage schools (that are operating legally) in the state are. This means that the massage school got their license from the state to operate as a school. Getting this school license means the school has passed certain requirements and posted a bond so that if they had to close, their students would be reimbursed for any unearned tuition. The situation is the same in most states in the country, and in fact roughly 3/4's of all massage schools nationally are licensed or approved to do business as a school in their state, but have not been accredited by a private accrediting agency. Most massage schools could not afford to get accreditation from one of these private accrediting corporations without a hefty tuition increase. In the case of our school we would have to triple or quadruple our tuition so that we could afford the fees to the accreditation agency, and hire the extra people to administer the federal financial aid (mostly in the forms of loans to students, which have to be paid back by the student not the school if the student can't repay their loan).

Comment by Marilyn St.John on February 14, 2011 at 10:41pm: I totally agree. Keep up the good work!

Comment by Valerie Hood on February 13, 2011 at 7:58pm: To me, the most beautiful aspect of teaching massage therapists is the exponential spread of the powerful healing that massage brings to a world that is in dire need of it. In my own practice, I can only help a limited number of people. But each student that I teach will then go out and spread the good to countless others. This is why we offer the scholarships that allow our students to graduate without debt. Without a heavy debt burden, they are more likely to succeed, and more able to be generous to others with their skills. With the scholarships we offer, students of The Massage School pay only $3600 for our 800 hour program.

Comment by Mike Hinkle on February 13, 2011 at 7:37pm: I agree Valerie,

Four years ago when I attended school down in Florida, it was $5,000. They had just got their accredidation and I was in the class that was their first one graduated with accredidation. It was a 600 hour course. When I recently went back to their website, it is now $9,950. They have only added 40 more hours(640 H) and the cost has DOUBLED!!! There is no excuse for that. If it would have cost me TEN GRAND to go to school, I couldn't have gone! That is not only a shame to deny poorer people like the young mothers you talk of not being able to enter this field as a possibility and means to support their family. But it is also a shame that the many, many peoples lives that they would have touched and healed, would not have been touched. Also I believe that if schooling costs more, the cost will be passed on to the end consumer. As these many interests will themselves opon us and every aspect of our profession drivng the hours up more and more, costs higher- this will translate into higher costs for the people, what our entire proffesion is here to serve. We will push out prospective clients that are in need of our services. That is the ultimate shame! This will only remain a lose, lose for all involved except the big companies and corperate interests, Unless we all band together and say Enough is enough. Most people agree 500 hours will produce compotent, market ready, massage therapists.