Assuming the government’s accusations are true, Indiana Attorney General Greg Zoeller’s decision to join a whistleblower lawsuit represents a welcome crackdown on a for-profit college accused of tempting recruiters with vacation trips in violation of federal law.

Indiana joins California, Florida and Illinois in the U.S. Justice Department suit against Education Management Corp. The company operates The Art Institute of Indianapolis and five Brown Mackie Colleges in Indiana, including a Fort Wayne campus at 3000 Coliseum Blvd. E. Goldman Sachs owns 41 percent of the Pittsburgh-based company.

The suit alleges Education Management violated the Higher Education Act by offering recruiters trips to Las Vegas; Puerto Vallarta and Cancun, Mexico; and other destinations as incentive to enroll students.

The law was passed to end recruitment practices encouraging enrollment of students unlikely to succeed in college or to have the resources to repay loans.

In an interview, Zoeller said a review of the for-profit college industry he participated in with other state attorney general’s offices did not focus on the quality of the education provided but instead looked at recruitment complaints and discovered “overexuberant recruiting practices.” Complaints from whistleblowers in 2007 serve as the basis of the suit.

“The idea that we have whistleblowers who give us the insider view of a programmatic decision that used incentive compensation to encourage recruitment well beyond what is allowed” lends strength to the case, Zoeller said.

The Indiana complaint identifies 16,814 student financial aid awards that went to the six Indiana schools, representing $12 million in student financial aid. Zoeller said the suit doesn’t claim that the students were ineligible for financial aid.

“I think we’re likely to find that, (but) the strongest case is the incentive-based recruitment,” he said. “We don’t have to prove the incentive-based recruitment caused additional harm. There were probably people that shouldn’t have been given loans, but that’s not the basis of the complaint.”

Zoeller said he didn’t want to suggest the case represents a common practice throughout the industry.

“We have looked at some of the other complaints,” he said. “In all honesty, we’ve not found this to be a problem throughout the industry in for-profit colleges.”

He also noted there is no effort to question the value of a Brown Mackie education, simply to challenge EDMC’s recruitment practices. Grants and loans approved through the State Student Assistance Commission of Indiana to students now attending Brown Mackie are not likely to be affected by the lawsuit, according to the attorney general’s office.

The company has denied any wrongdoing.

“Federal regulations issued in 2002 permitted companies to consider enrollments in admission officer compensation, so long as enrollments were not the sole factor considered,” said Bonnie Campbell, a spokeswoman for Education Management’s legal counsel, in a statement. “To ensure compliance with this regulation, EDMC worked closely with outside experts in both human resources and education law to develop a plan that required consideration of five quality factors along with enrollment numbers to determine salaries.”

Recovering taxpayer dollars in the civil suit, which alleges $11 billion in fraud nationally, would be the best outcome, but the publicity of the suit alone serves a useful “buyer beware” function. If prospective college students begin to look more critically at offers of lucrative job opportunities for little or no personal investment, they might begin to shop around for the school that best fits their skills and financial situation. Zoeller’s efforts in protecting student and taxpayer interests serve Hoosiers well.