At a town-hall-style meeting in New Hampshire last month, listeners pressed Mitt Romney on the soaring cost of higher education. His solution: students should consider for-profit colleges like the little-known Full Sail University in Florida.

Mr. Romney did not mention...that its chief executive, Bill Heavener, is a major campaign donor and a co-chairman of his state fund-raising team in Florida.

Mr. Heavener...and his wife have each given the maximum $2,500 to the campaign, and he gave $45,000 to Restore Our Future, a “super PAC” run by former Romney aides to bolster his campaign.

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.

While a number of other Full Sail programs also showed low graduation rates, some fared much better. For instance, the master’s curriculum in entertainment business, a yearlong program with a $36,245 tuition, graduated 80 percent of its students, nearly 63 percent of them on time. (Many of the school’s degree programs provided no data at all because Full Sail said students had not yet completed them.)

“They bring a new class in every month, so there’s a graduating class every month and they can place people” in the job market, Mr. Romney said, adding that “they hold down the cost of their education” by recognizing that they are in competition with other for-profit and traditional colleges.