And I am sympathetic to your point -- there's a lot of excesses and not-functionally-relevant requirements in academia these days.

But NYC has a lengthy and altruistic history of charity/nonprofit educational institutions for those who have been denied access at one time or another, and this just happened to be an example of that.

I would be fascinated to get a meta analysis of tech school faculty requirements, 1940 - 2023, though. Honestly can't guess if they've drifted or not.