and not the president is because full sale university is a business, a for-profit institution, and when mitt romney gets asked policy questions about higher education, he often brings up for-profit colleges, and specifically, he often brings up full sale university, that specific school. that happens to be run by his fundraising co-chair. i was in a place in florida called full sale university. they provide a four-year degree for people in the entertainment world, production, media, broadcast, and so forth. they hold down the cost of their education by recognizing they are competing. full sale university, cited by mr. romney, is the example of how to hold down the cost of education. it costs $81,000 to do a 21-month program in video game art at full sale university. that s what mitt romney ss is going to save america from high education costs.
education, but the more loans a student can take out, the more money these students could potentially soak out of them. the more eligible you are as a student for loans, the more beautiful you are as a marketing target for these schools, and so if you are a post-9/11 veteran eligible for the post-9/11 g.i. bill, for these schools, you are a very, very beautiful target indeed. since the post-9/11 g.i. bill took effect almost three years ago right now, eight of the ten colleges collecting the most money have been for-profit schools. as taxpayers, we are paying for veterans higher education. that s what the g.i. bill means. we have a national interest in doing that, and these schools are marketing aggressively to veterans to our federal taxpayer money is going to them, the for-profit schools. it s $4,600 to pay for a ve tan to go to public school. it s more than $10,000 for that same veteran to go to a for-profit school, and at that
marketing machine. whether or not you graduate, whether or not your degree is worth anything in terms of getting you a job, perhaps in the video game art field, whether or not you are able to ever repay the loans that you took out to be able to pay for these expensive programs, the business model of the for-profit school industry is to market to you aggressively, to get you to sign up. to then get you to take out loans to pay your tuition to the school, and then to cash those loan checks. they get paid and you owe the money to whoever gave you the loan. and more often than not, the entity that gave you the loan is the federal government. in the 2009 school year, for-profit schools got paid $32 billion in federal money. one out of every four dollars the education department put out in student aid went to a for-profit school. this is students taking out federally supported student loans to pay these schools. the reason we do that is because there s supposed to be a national interest in
for-profit school, what we get for our extra money is a lower graduation rate, higher student loan default rate, and a whole lot of profit to make sure these marketing machines are very, very, very well politically connected. joining us now is tom tarantino, chief policy officer for iraq and afghanistan veterans of america, which is a non-partisan organization i support. tom, thank you very much for being here. appreciate your time. thanks for having me, rachel. is it your experience as a veteran and working with vets that post-9/11 veterans are specifically being targeted by for-profit schools? absolutely. this is largely because of loopholes created before the g.i. bill actually existed that classified the g.i. bill as private funding. we have controls on for-profit schools so they don t abuse the system, so they have some element of free market control