Spin control: Did Pat Toomey rip off our military to make a profit?
The claim: “Ripping off our military to make a profit: Pat Toomey is Washington at its worst.”
Where it was made: An ad targeting Republican Sen. Pat Toomey, aired by VoteVets.org, a left-of-center veterans group.
Why it matters: Veterans are a key constituency in Pennsylvania and in Pittsburgh, where VoteVets has spent nearly $260,000 airing the spot this week. Rating: Very wobbly
Analysis: The ad is based on ties between Mr. Toomey and Yorktown University, an online college with a conservative curriculum. As the Post-Gazette first reported in June, Mr. Toomey invested $5,000 in the nowdefunct school and served on its board prior to taking his Senate seat.
In the spot, Afghanistan veteran Damien Melendez asserts, “[V]eterans like me earned educational benefits. But we didn’t expect forprofit colleges to try to scam us when we returned home. Pat Toomey served on the board of a for-profit college that targeted veterans. He tried to turn our military benefits into his financial gain.”
Recruiting veterans is a crucial, and sometimes controversial, business strategy for for-profit schools, which depend on students with federal loans and other aid. The government caps how much of that aid a school can receive — but veteran benefits like the GI Bill don’t count toward the cap. That makes vets a potentially lucrative niche. A 2012 Senate committee report found cases in which students were recruited while being treated in veterans hospitals.
A VoteVets spokesman confirmed that Mr. Melendez never attended Yorktown. And to hear Yorktown officials tell it, neither did almost anyone else.
Yorktown’s founder, Pittsburgh native Richard Bishirjian, has said the school never had more than five students at a time and granted only a handful of degrees before losing its accreditation for financial reasons in 2012. (The school turned to offering non-credit courses.)
Yorktown’s business plan, as reflected in financial filings, identified veterans as a target market, along with working adults, home-school students and those “engaged in a personal spiritual quest.” The school envisioned advertising in military publications, conservative magazines and other outlets.
But “we never went directly to the students,” said Wade Shol, a Marine veteran who acted as a liaison between Yorktown and potential veteran students in the mid- to late 2000s. “We visited a lot of bases,” he said. “We never got many bites.”
He and Mr. Bishirjian said they could remember only one military person enrolling at Yorktown. And Mr. Shol said the VoteVets ad falsely conflated Yorktown with the behavior of larger, and potentially less scrupulous, schools.
“I am rather astonished that anyone would put that in a campaign for U.S. Senate,” he said. “It's pretty slanderous.”
“That so few veterans fell for this scam isn’t an excuse for targeting them for a ripoff,” countered Jon Soltz, chair of VoteVets and an Iraq veteran. Yorktown “tried to lure our nation’s veterans into a risky, unproven, financially unstable venture so they could personally profit from their military benefits.”
Mr. Toomey also has attracted criticism by opposing a federal “gainful employment” rule, which pulls government support at schools where debt dramatically outpaces graduate earnings. VoteVets and others say the rule offers vets protection from misleading sales pitches.
Still, there is no evidence that any vet was aggrieved by Yorktown. And Mr. Toomey appears to have lost money, rather than profited: His $5,000 investment is now worthless, since the school was unable to meet loan obligations this year.
Bottom line: Whatever the merits or failings of forprofit schools, Mr. Toomey doesn’t seem to have profited from this one.