“Except with some rare circumstances, their prices are more expensive than community colleges and even four-year institutions,” said Donald E. Heller, dean of education at Michigan State University, who has studied for-profit colleges. “It’s hard to argue against the idea of competition, but anybody who knows the business will tell you that most of the for-profits are not competing on price.”

The Romney campaign declined to comment on the financial support it has received from executives in the for-profit college industry and the candidate’s support for Full Sail University.

Situated on a 191-acre campus outside Orlando, with 110 studios and production facilities, Full Sail was founded 30 years ago to train students for careers in film, music, entertainment and sports marketing and related fields, often on the production side of the business. With about 15,000 students, it boasts of a number of alumni who have gone on to win Grammys and other prestigious awards or worked with big-name performers like Madonna and Jay-Z.

One focus has been recruiting both active and former military personnel, who are eligible for special federal financing for educational programs. Full Sail has generally been regarded more highly than many other institutions in the for-profit college industry as a whole, which has been the target of withering criticism in the last few years in the wake of federal investigations into fraudulent marketing practices, poor academic records and huge loans assumed by students ill-prepared for the expensive programs.

Still, the school has attracted its share of criticism on Internet discussion boards and YouTube postings from its own students and alumni, with some alumni even deriding it as a “scam” because of what they described as high tuition, inadequate career training and difficulties in transferring credits to other schools.

Some of Full Sail’s 37 degree programs have suffered from high loan burdens and low graduation rates, data show.

The $81,000 video game art program, for instance, graduated just 14 percent of its 272 students on time and only 38 percent at all, while the students carried a median debt load of nearly $59,000 in federal and private loans in 2008, according to data that the federal Education Department now requires for-profit colleges to disclose in response to criticism of their academic records.