Sen. John McCain may be a war hero, but he is also a politician. This means that while he is a great ally to the military community, he is still beholden to his largest and most unscrupulous donors.

One such donor is the University of Phoenix, a for-profit educational institution put on probation by the Pentagon for using deceptive recruiting tactics to ensnare military veterans and eat up their GI Bill benefits.

Despite having the word ‘university’ in its name, the University of Phoenix is more about making money than educating students. While traditional colleges are beholden to state governments, alumni, donors and parents, for-profit colleges are owned by private parent companies and can provide as much–or, more frequently, as little–educational value as they like while ramping up tuition costs.

In a for-profit college, graduating students is less important than signing them up. The University of Phoenix’s graduation rate is less than 15 percent, and 25 percent of students default on their student loans within a year. Recruiters often use fake statistics to convince prospective students to sign up for student loans they can’t pay back because as long as the school gets the upfront tuition payment, the fate of the student or their education means little.

The University of Phoenix specifically targets military members because they have access to the GI Bill, aka guaranteed tuition money. Veterans complained to the White House of various abuses committed against veterans who just wanted to use their GI Bills to broaden their opportunities. The most extreme case involved the institution’s enrollment of veterans with brain injuries too severe to even know what classes they were taking.

Earlier this year, President Obama signed an executive order to prevent this abuse. On Oct. 7, the Pentagon followed through and formally stopped the University of Phoenix from coming to military bases and using military insignias to recruit troops.

A Pentagon spokesman explained that the institution, “will not be authorized access to DoD installations for the purposes of participating in any recruitment-type activities, including but not limited to job training, and career events and fairs.  Further, no new or transfer students at the institution will be permitted to receive DoD tuition assistance.”

Despite the University of Phoenix’s poor record of student success, McCain and two other senators wrote a letter to the Pentagon asking it to give the for-profit college another chance.

“We strongly believe that these earned benefits and educational opportunities for our servicemembers should not be jeopardized because of political or ideological opinions of some Members of Congress regarding the types of institutions that provide postsecondary education to our troops,” the letter read.