Young people understand that the opportunities to build a better life that come with a college degree have a cost. It’s no secret that college is expensive, but many of us still pursue a degree and take on the burden of student loans because higher education opens doors. Forty-five million Americans have student loan debt. New Hampshire has the highest percentage of students graduating with debt in the country. 

As high schoolers, we’re busy writing college applications while balancing homework, jobs, and extracurriculars. We’re drafting essays and gathering letters of recommendation for scholarships. For so many of us, these scholarships are potential lifelines we need to make our dreams of attending college a reality. The hours we spend researching, writing, and applying to them are an investment in ourselves.

This is no joke, which is why Republican U.S. Senate candidate Corky Messner’s scam scholarship foundation is such an affront to students and families everywhere. According to a new report from the Washington Post, Corky created the “Messner Foundation” that hosts showy luxury car raffles under the guise of raising money to fund scholarships for low-income students. The foundation has allegedly raised hundreds of thousands of dollars from donors, but it only ever awarded one single student any scholarship money in its first 10 years of existence.

Students like me apply to scholarships like the one advertised by Messner’s fake foundation with the hope that it could ease the immense financial challenge of paying for college. After the Messner Foundation raised massive amounts of money for scholarships it never gave out, the biggest beneficiaries haven’t been low-income students, but instead Messner’s business, his family, and his own reputation. Before any scholarship was ever awarded, his own children’s elite private school, Colorado Academy, received more than half the foundation’s assets to help build a new baseball field in 2014. But the foundation’s biggest personal perk is the publicity.

Messner exploits the stories of low-income students working for a better life by selling the idea that he’s giving them a hand up with his fake foundation, garnering good press for himself and his law firm, Messner Reeves LLP. On many occasions, he used the Messner Foundation to boost his and his firm’s standing with local media in his home state of Colorado. He then tried to do the same thing in New Hampshire after he moved to his lake house here to run for Senate. The sham Messner Foundation has been a key talking point throughout his campaign.

On Messner’s campaign website and at events, he applauds himself for this “family foundation,” and he claimed that he used “mostly [his] personal money…to help these kids,” even though the Washington Post found “no records of personal contributions from Messner.” The Messner Foundation claims to value “humility” and “commitment” in students, but its founder has failed to demonstrate either. Instead, Messner has defrauded donors and lied to students.

He was dishonest to his donors and to vulnerable students when he solicited donations and applications for scholarships that he would never award. He was dishonest to the media when he bragged about all the young people he said he was “helping.” Over a decade, with his fraud and deception, Messner abandoned undisclosed numbers of underprivileged students who spent hours writing essays and perfecting their applications for scholarships that would never be awarded.

Messner’s fraudulent actions demonstrate how out of touch he is with the urgency of the college affordability crisis and the very real financial challenges facing students long after they graduate. If helping low-income students pay for college was about more than just personal and political self-promotion, he would have used the hundreds of thousands he fundraised to actually help students rather than misleading and exploiting them.

We need leaders who understand how to ease the financial burden of pursuing a college education, not ones who actively deceive hard-working students. Corky Messner’s “foundation” as an exercise in vanity is unethical and unforgivable, and it shows that he lacks the moral integrity required to serve in the U.S. Senate.

Abby Gendron is a recent Nashua High School North graduate, who is starting at UNH Manchester in the fall.

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