Good morning. My name is Mikeal Swenson, and I served in the U.S. Army for six and a half years. I was deployed twice to Afghanistan where I was wounded and earned a Purple Heart.
After leaving the military, I enrolled at Full Sail University for music production. When I first talked to Full Sail, they connected me with a recruiter who told me he was a former admiral in the U.S. Navy. The recruiter used his military experience and rank to gain my trust. He told me Full Sail paired graduates with employers and provided resources for the job search. Nearly every promise made by the recruiter was a lie.
The classes were terrible. Full Sail set unrealistic expectations for students and never taught us what we needed to know. The accelerated classes were not preparing us for the jobs we wanted. My instructors also had questionable credentials for teaching.
I withdrew from Full Sail after two years. I got an internship through my own connections, and I learned from my coworkers that I actually needed a degree in electrical engineering for my desired career, not the music production degree Full Sail had put me in. They also told me that my school was a waste of money, and there were better schools I should go to if I wanted to work in music.
Afterwards, I attended a community college that was a much better school. The Introduction to Music Theory class taught me more than all four of Full Sail’s classes on music theory. I am now attending Arizona State to finally earn my Bachelor’s, but it has taken so much more time and money than it should have. Because of Full Sail’s deceptive recruiting practices and poor quality of teaching, I had to start college all over again in my thirties. I have earned enough credits for a bachelor’s degree, but I still don’t have one because my Full Sail credits were not transferable. I feel like Full Sail stole my GI Bill from me.
I believe that the Department of Education should hold schools accountable when they lie to students, and not allow the veterans who are seeking an education to be harmed. My program at Full Sail only had an 11% graduation rate, so I’m not the only one who was harmed.
I am concerned that cuts to the Department of Education will rob it of its ability to help students like me who have been taken advantage of. I am sharing my experience in the hopes that something like this will not happen to anyone else, and I think that there should continue to be help available for people like me. Thank you for your time as you consider new policies.