Full text search using a table column as input criteria?

I am trying to use a full text index (already created and working fine) to search a column using another table as input. I've been trying to use CONTAINS to do this and ideally I would be able to JOIN on CONTAINS to accomplish this, but that doesn't work.

I know this doesn't work, but may help you understand what I'm trying to do:

select sku, type  from dbo.Product_search ps                    
INNER JOIN dbo.Product_Location_Universities plu on contains(searchValue, plu.SearchText)                    

The reason I'm doing this is that the criteria table (dbo.Product_Location_Universities) is about 5,000 records, charindex works but is too slow, and I was hoping to leverage the existing index.