Free Calculators and Checklists
Trade School Red Flag Checklist
Work down the checklist below before anyone signs anything. It is built from the Federal Trade Commission’s own guidance on choosing a vocational school, plus the four lookups a parent can do without help from the school. It will never tell you a school is good. It reports what you have not yet verified, because that is the only thing a checklist can honestly do, and the single most useful line in the FTC’s guidance is that if a school will not give you documents to review before you commit, you should not enroll.
Tick what you have actually done, not what you intend to do. Nothing is stored or sent anywhere. Print the page and the checklist comes out as a plain list you can fill in with a pen.
Documents and pressure
Claims the school made
The visit
Checks I can do without the school
One check to skip this year. The federal cohort default rate is the classic way to spot a school whose graduates cannot repay. It currently reads 0.0 percent for every sector, because the pandemic payment pause meant no borrowers with Department-held loans entered default during the measurement window. It cannot tell you anything about this school or any other right now, so it is not on the list above.
Where this list comes from
Two places, and no further. The first is the Federal Trade Commission’s consumer guidance on choosing a vocational school or certificate program, which is short, free, and better than almost anything written by the industry it regulates. The second is 16 CFR Part 254, the FTC’s Guides for Private Vocational and Distance Education Schools, which is the rulebook the schools themselves are held to.
Nothing here is invented and nothing is a proprietary framework. If a line on the list looks obvious, that is a good sign. The point of a checklist is not novelty, it is that the obvious things get skipped when someone is enthusiastic and a deadline is being waved at them.
The one line that does most of the work
If the school will not give you documents to review before you commit, do not enroll.
That is the FTC’s own sentence, and it is the single most useful heuristic available to a parent on this subject. It works because it does not require you to evaluate anything. You do not need to know whether the placement rate is good. You only need to notice whether you were allowed to take the paperwork home and read it.
The pressure version is its twin. The FTC asks whether the school is leaning on you to decide before you have had a chance to research. A program that is confident in its outcomes has no reason to need an answer this afternoon. Both of those lines are marked in the checklist above, and if either is unticked, the tool puts it at the top of what you still need to sort out.
What the checklist deliberately does not do
It does not score. There is no version of this where you tick fourteen boxes and get told the school is fine, because that is not a claim a list of questions can support. The output is a count and then a list of what is still outstanding, phrased as what you have not verified.
That framing is not squeamishness. A school can satisfy every line here and still be wrong for your teenager, and a school that fails any of the four lines the FTC treats as warning signs has already told you what you needed to know regardless of how the rest scores. Weighting those four more heavily than the other sixteen and then adding them all into a single number would destroy the information.
The check that has quietly stopped working
For twenty years the standard advice for spotting a bad school was to look up its cohort default rate, the share of its borrowers who default on federal student loans within the measurement window. It was a good measure, because it captured the thing you actually care about: whether graduates end up able to repay.
It is currently useless. The FY 2022 official national rate is 0.0 percent, and it is 0.0 percent for public, private nonprofit, proprietary and foreign institutions alike. The Department of Education explains why in its own briefing: the rates were significantly affected by the pause on federal student loan payments that began on March 13, 2020, during which borrowers with Department-held loans were not required to make payments and no such borrower entered default.
For scale, the same series reported 11.8 percent for FY 2012, 10.8 percent for FY 2015 and 7.3 percent for FY 2018. A measure that used to separate schools now returns the same answer for all of them, for reasons that have nothing to do with any school’s quality. If somebody tells you a school has a zero percent default rate, they have told you nothing, and possibly they know that.
Use College Scorecard for accredited institutions, and TrainingProviderResults.gov for the short non-degree programs Scorecard misses entirely. Those two are the replacement.
Accredited school, accredited program
Here is the distinction that catches people. Under 16 CFR 254.3(a)(1) a school should not represent, without qualification, that it is accredited unless all of its courses and programs have been accredited by an agency recognised by the Department of Education. Under 254.3(a)(2) it should not represent that it is approved without disclosing the nature, extent and purpose of the approval.
So there are three different sentences a school might say, and only one of them answers your question. We are accredited. This program is accredited. We are approved. Ask which agency accredits the specific program your teenager would enrol in, write the name down, and then find it yourself in the Department’s accreditation database. Two minutes, and it is the check that most often produces a surprise.
A worked example
Oscar’s mother is looking at a nine month HVAC certificate at a private school an hour away. The example is illustrative. She is not suspicious of the place, she just wants to be able to say she looked.
She works the list in about forty minutes, spread over two days. Most of it is fine. The visit happens, the workshop has real equipment, the instructors are named. Two lines do not close. The school gives a completion figure verbally and will not put it in an email, and the phrase used on the website is that the school is accredited, while the admissions staff cannot name which agency accredits the HVAC program specifically.
Neither of those is proof of anything. Both are questions with a right answer that somebody should be able to give her, and the tool’s output is the list of the two lines still open rather than a verdict about the school. She sends one email asking for both in writing. What comes back, and how fast, is the actual test.
After the checklist
If the numbers the school gives you and the numbers on Scorecard disagree, that gap is the most interesting thing you will find, and it deserves a direct question in writing. It is also worth knowing what a placement rate can be made to mean before you accept one, which is the subject of what a job placement rate actually means.
Finally, remember that this decision has an alternative that charges nothing. A registered apprenticeship pays from the first week and its costs sit on a completely different footing. Apprenticeship, trade school or community college sets the three routes side by side, and the training cost comparison will do the arithmetic once you have real figures for each.
Questions parents keep asking
Why does this not give the school a score out of ten?
Because a score would be a claim this checklist cannot support. Ticking eight boxes does not mean a school is good, it means eight things have been checked. There are twenty lines on the list, and the four the FTC treats as warning signs are worth more than the other sixteen put together. A number would also invite exactly the behaviour the list is trying to prevent, which is a parent deciding they have done enough. The output is a list of what is still unverified, which is the honest shape of the information you have.
Should I check the school's cohort default rate?
Not right now, and this is the most counterintuitive thing on the page. The federal cohort default rate has been the standard way to spot a bad school for decades. The FY 2022 official national rate is 0.0 percent, and it is 0.0 percent for public, private nonprofit, proprietary and foreign institutions alike, because the pandemic payment pause meant no borrowers with Department-held loans entered default. In the same series, FY 2012 was 11.8 percent and FY 2018 was 7.3 percent. The measure currently has no power to distinguish one school from another. Use College Scorecard and TrainingProviderResults.gov instead.
What is the difference between the school being accredited and the program being accredited?
It is a real legal distinction and it is where a lot of trouble hides. Under 16 CFR 254.3(a)(1), a school should not represent without qualification that it is accredited unless all its courses and programs have been accredited by an agency recognised by the Department of Education. So “we are accredited” and “this program is accredited” are two different claims. Ask which agency accredits the specific program your teenager would enrol in, then confirm it yourself in the Department’s accreditation database.
Does this work if I turn JavaScript off, or print it?
Yes. The checklist is ordinary HTML with real checkboxes, so it works untouched with scripts disabled and prints as a plain list you can carry into a meeting and fill in with a pen. When JavaScript is on, a summary appears underneath telling you which lines are still outstanding. Nothing you tick is stored or sent anywhere, and reloading clears it.
The school passes every line. Is it a good school?
It is a school that has answered your questions and can be verified in public databases, which is more than many can manage. It is still not a verdict. Completion and employment figures that a school gives you should be compared against Scorecard and TrainingProviderResults.gov, and where they disagree, the disagreement is the story. Read what a job placement rate actually means before you accept any placement figure from anybody.