A recent New York Times article delved in to the confounding decision by Mitt Romney to praise Full Sail University here in Orlando as an achievement of higher education.

For those that didn’t read it, when asked about the soaring cost of higher education, Romney responded that schools should be more like Full Sail University in Orlando, which provides students with a cheap alternative to public colleges. Now, I understand the appeal in citing a school in the I-4 corridor that is run by a major donor to your campaign. The more plugs for our region the better chance you can connect to our constituents, and you need us to win the presidency.

In this case however, it makes you appear to be severely out of touch. Full Sail is notorious here in Orlando for churning out graduates who work in menial labor, yet have to pay off tens of thousands of dollars in debt. There are programs at Full Sail that cost 80,000 a year. For comparison UCF graduates leave with an average of around 18,000 a year, while Full Sail students leave with an average of 59,000 a year.

This story strikes particularly close to home for me, since I’m a part of the music community here in Orlando, playing in 3 separate bands since I’ve moved here.  The music community here in inextricably linked to Full Sail, as most people you meet that play music have graduated from the school.

I played in a band at one time where everyone but me and the lead singer were graduates from the school. Of these four graduates one was a telemarketer, one was unemployed, one worked in promotions for Full Sail, and only one worked in the music industry where he ran a small recording studio in a low income part of town that charged the cheap rate of $25 an hour.

Two of my best friends also graduated from the school. One is unemployed, lives with his parents in New York City and works part time as a DJ while in his spare time making hip hop beats, the other one pushes paper in Los Angeles at Atlantic Records where he dots I’s and crosses t’s on contracts.

Every one of these people is strapped with near 100,000 dollars in debt. What’s sad about this is all of these people are smart, hardworking, and would be great hires to any company. They just graduated with a degree in an art that is low paying and falling quickly, and have paid massive amounts of money to get this degree.

The way Full Sail was able to sell this to people was very similar to the way banks were able to sell sub-prime mortgages to low income people. They took a population that is not very knowledgeable on finance, low income people in subprime and young people at Full Sail, and sold them a luxury wrapped in an investment. In subprime it was a beautiful house they could never afford, at Full Sail it’s a school that gives you a free computer, expensive equipment, expensive studios to play around in, and a beautiful school to do that in. They then wrapped this luxury in a false sense of investment prowess; in the subprime mess it was the idea that your house will always gain value and you will actually make money off of it, at Full Sail they give false statistics on job rates and juke statistics to make it look like their graduates are getting good jobs right out of school. Full Sail then highlights people that have graduated that have made it in the real world, which shifts focus from the likely downside, the throngs of people that are now aged 20 and under mountains of debt, and onto the unlikely upside of what they could do. This makes people think they are investing in their future, when really they’re just feeding into the lizard brain.

The way for profit colleges restructure the debt payments to get themselves off the hook for selling these crummy investments is also very similar to subprime. I don’t have the time to go into it, but CNBC did a phenomenal piece on the subject in 2010 if you are at all interested.

Now, if Romney and his campaign did any research on the subject these things would not be too difficult to find. I don’t think it’s strange that Romney would choose Full Sail as an example of a working for profit as he had lots of incentives to do so, but he should have done his homework first. It’s screw ups like these that made a huge dent on the last election (McCain, “The economy is fundamentally sound) and could have a large effect this election. Romney is going to be the candidate for the Republicans, and if he wants to beat Barack Obama he’s going to have to do a lot better than this.