“Credit Card Companies Marketing to College Students”

“Credit Card Companies Marketing to College Students”

The American credit system is very complicated and involves both corporations and individuals. On an individual level credit is what one accrues as debt is accumulated throughout life. The most prominent part of this selection process is the individual credit score. This score is affected by the amount of debt one has and how rapidly or regularly this is paid off over time. This credit status is also used by lenders and lending corporations to decide if a future loan should be given. One common way to build a credit score is to open loan accounts or credit cards and pay them off diligently. However, a lot of the time, credit cards are misused and used to spend money that a consumer has little no way of paying back. Card companies can take advantage of this through their lending process and cause one small debt to be a long term problem. For instance, it is very common for card companies to advertise to young college-aged adults on college campuses. In my opinion, the practices used to do this are not ethical or productive manners to promote their services.

The idea of credit ethics is a relatively new topic that piqued common interest during the collapse of the housing market. With that in mind, there are certain similarities between the types of loans given to cause the recent real estate devastation and the ploys used by card companies on college campuses. For instance, in the beginning of the practice not many card companies actually educated the prospective consumers of the rules regarding paying back the card balances. So students were not advised of possible interest rates (especially those that may fluctuate) or the ramifications for late or missing payments. Even more importantly, a lot of the cards given even today are given without the lender double checking the applicant's income. Therefore the card balance was based solely on the income reported by the applicant and the student could honestly...