College Credit Card Debt

By Nicholas Vanikiotis

Now more than ever college students are being bombarded with credit card applications. Personally I alone get a new application every couple weeks with some enticing offer that has seemingly amazing rates and bonus packages. But with the mounting debt being accumulated by college students sooner or later it will catch up with them. An average college student has approximately 4,000 dollars accumulated in credit card debt. It seems that no one is teaching students how to properly manage their finances and thus are being consumed with debt. An interesting statistic is that 22% of students pay the minimum balance each month and only 17% pay their balances off in full. The other 41% are carrying their balances over each month, accumulating charges that can easily be avoided with proper credit management.

One good thing that the government is doing is in May they passed a law, which tightened the rules on credit card fine print and variable rates on college campus credit cards. The government also needs to address the affinity credit practices that campuses are doing with card companies. Credit card companies are paying hundreds of dollars per student to the University for access to their personal information. This is giving college campuses millions of dollars The Obama administration has done nothing to address this.

http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/content/sep2007/db2007093_443488.htm

http://moneyfeatures.blogs.money.cnn.com/2009/10/15/my-12-year-old-got-a-credit-card-offer/

http://redtape.msnbc.com/2009/05/college-debt-so-crushing-grad-says-i-wish-id-gone-to-prison-instead.html