College students take aim at credit card vendors on campus

Friday, Jan. 25, 2002 | 2:25 a.m.

The deluge of credit card offers on campuses nationwide, with pitches in person, by phone and e-mail, has some college students and their schools looking for ways to stop the flood.

University regents in Nevada on Thursday were considering a demand that they stop selling student names and addresses to credit card vendors.

The proposal followed complaints from Denise Wilcox, a part-time community college student from Henderson, Nev., who says one mail pitch suggested she "show your school pride" by getting a credit card.

The student government at the University of California, Berkeley is among those that now require vendors on campus to hand out information about the financial risks involved with credit cards. Lawmakers in California and several other states also have voted to ban companies from luring students to apply for credit with gifts such as T-shirts and calculators.

Greg Combs, a senior at the University of Texas at Dallas, is so fed up he's taken matters into his own hands. He's unlisted his phone number, added his name to "black lists" aimed at stopping credit card vendors from calling and added filters to his e-mail.

His university also has banned vendors from setting up booths on campus. Yet Combs says he still gets credit card applications in his home mailbox every week and sees advertisements on campus bulletin boards "everywhere!"

He thinks the only way to solve the problem is to ban anyone younger than 25 from having them. But bankers and credit card companies scoff at this idea.

They say college, and in some cases high school, is the perfect time for students to learn fiscal responsibility. Most students, they say, manage their credit cards well.

"How they get the card is really less of an issue than how they handle it," says Joe Belew, president of the Virginia-based Consumer Bankers Association, a national trade association of banks that specializes in retail and consumer financial services.

Some university administrators agree with Belew's assertion that education about fiscal responsibility - sponsored by anyone from credit card vendors to the students themselves - is key.

"Limiting information is not the answer to this problem," says Richard Black, an assistant vice chancellor at UC Berkeley, where credit card education sessions will soon be added to orientations for new students.

Black says he is concerned about statistics showing that 6 percent of freshman and a quarter of incoming juniors at his school have credit card debt of $2,000 or more - figures that jibe with other national surveys.

But even if the university banned credit card vendors from campus, he says, they can - and do - set up shop across the street on private property.

Still, some critics have questioned the real motivation of universities that sell student lists, or lend their logos to credit cards in exchange for a small slice of the profits.

Wilcox, the Nevada student, says universities should realize that affiliating with credit card companies gives the companies "more credence" with some students.

"By association, a student may feel more comfortable getting a card by the mere fact that the university has allowed it," she says.

Steve Sisolak, a Nevada regent from Las Vegas, agrees that the university system shouldn't sell information without students' knowledge.

"I'm OK with releasing it if we get permission," he says, suggesting that student be asked to check a box on their applications to indicate their preference.

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On the Net:

Financial literacy site for students: http://www.jumpstart.org

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Martha Irvine can be reached at mirvine(at)ap.org