Mitt Romney speaks with people during a Roundtable on Housing Issues on January 23, 2012 in Tampa, Florida. Joe Raedle/Getty Images

At a campaign stop in New Hampshire in December, presidential candidate Mitt Romney answered a question regarding concerns over the rising cost of higher education by praising for-profit higher education.

Romney said that programs like Full Sail University, a for-profit college based in Florida, would keep costs lower by providing competition to traditional non-profit universities. What Romney did not disclose was that the company’s chief executive has donated nearly $50,000 to promote the Romney campaign, a detail later revealed by The New York Times.

Supporters of for-profit higher education claim that these non-traditional programs offer students an alternative to traditional higher education with, similar results. However, at Full Sail — the college Romney cited as a success story — only 14% of students graduated on time in a program with very expensive tuition rates. A look at all for-profit higher education programs reveals a graduation rate of only 22%.

Students in these programs also account for nearly half of all student loan defaults, even though they make up only 10% of the population of students enrolled in higher education. Though data on unemployment specifically related to for-profit graduates is slim, the unemployment rate for all college graduates is the highest it has been in forty years.

This statistic isn’t promising for students who invest their time and savings into expensive programs with dismal rates of graduation.

Romney argues that for-profit colleges use principles of the free market to allow an alternative to traditional higher education. He is correct that these companies should be free to provide a product – in this case, a college diploma – if there is a market for that product. In the current anemic job market, Americans of every age are looking for any cure they can find for unemployment or low wages.

For-profit higher education is just not the panacea for those ailments.

In addition to draining the resources of individual students and offering few returns, for-profit colleges take advantage of federal programs designed to help poor students earn a degree. Though their student bodies account for less than 10% of all college students, a significant amount of all Pell Grant funding goes to for-profit higher education companies.

Some derive nearly 90% of their income from federal financial aid funding — often through students that never receive a diploma.

As is clear from these statistics, higher education is far from a free market. Though less regulation is an admirable stance, the manipulation of the regulated market by these for-profit colleges completely undermines the notion that their thriving returns are a result of their product being adopted for its quality.

Allowing federal money for scholarships to prop up for-profit college companies is not the cure for the soaring cost of higher education.

Contrary to Romney’s claims, through low graduation rates, high rate of student loan default, a disproportionate take from grant funding and poor rates of post-graduation employment, for-profit colleges give potential students fewer options, not more.

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