Wed, Aug 29, 2001 page17

• Credit card issuers prey on students

  PLASTIC ADDICTS By enticing cash-strapped students to buy now and pay later, many believe that card issuing firms are behaving irresponsibly

  • By Patrick Kearns / STAFF REPORTER
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  Credit card issuers have teamed up with Taiwanese universities to profit from getting cash-strapped college students hooked on swiping plastic. And with schools nationwide set to start the fall semester in the next few weeks, a new throng of potential customers stands ready to start out their adult lives by digging a deep financial hole.

  This comes in direct contrast to the apparent policy trend on US university campuses. Many US schools -- after nearly two decades of allowing credit-card peddlers and college students to mix freely on campuses -- have learned a sad lesson from the volatile combination.

  According to a critical 1999 study from Georgetown University sociologist Robert Manning and the Consumer Federation of America, past studies of students and credit cards have failed to report on the seriousness of the problem.

  "The unrestricted marketing of credit cards on college campuses is so aggressive that it now poses a greater threat than alcohol or sexually transmitted diseases," Manning said.

  Nearly 500 US colleges and universities last year took heed of the call and banned credit-card marketers from their campuses. In addition, the US Congress and several state legislatures have climbed on board with legislation that will curb the marketing and issuing of cards to college students.

  Manning said "financial naivete" was behind the growing student credit-card debt dilemma, as well as "the extension of unaffordable credit lines, increasing education-related expenses and peer pressure to spend."

  While the cost of a college education in Taiwan is a mere fraction of the cost of obtaining a degree in a US school, the practice of encouraging card use by the education system itself may be a recipe for disaster here. It remains to be seen if Taiwanese students are any more financially mature than their US counterparts, or whether Taiwan officials -- new to the potential problems associated with student credit-card use -- will learn from the tough lessons their American counterparts have learned.

  US educators say the credit fallout results in students reducing course load to work more hours at a part-time jobs and applying for student loans to pay off the debt they've run up on credit cards. Many exit school life thousands of dollars in the red. On average US students carry a monthly debt of US$2,600. The push over past decades to get US students hooked has succeeded, with a whopping 78 percent of all university students choosing to pay with plastic.

  But the numbers come with a price tag for US schools too: many facilities are finding it necessary to allocate increasing amounts of cash to fund the rising demand for student credit counseling services. The seemingly insurmountable debt have triggered several student suicides in the US.

  The first signs of trouble from the local student credit push have apparently not appeared on university campuses, but rather on the home front.

  "We get lots of complaints from parents seeking to limit student access to credit cards," Tom Huang (黃天牧) director of the Bureau of Monetary Affairs' fourth division, charged with overseeing consumer credit issues, told the Taipei Times.

  Taiwanese parents are not only outraged at the credit card offensive going on at college campuses, they are tired of being asked to foot the bill.

  "Parents think card companies are irresponsible ... and they don't want their children to have a bad credit record, so they pay the bill."

  A single payment missed will place a black mark on a student's credit record for five years, according to a Chinatrust Commercial Bank (中國信託) credit-card division official who requested anonymity.

  The surging number of complaints from parents has spurred the bureau to "request the Banker's Association (銀行公會) to self-regulate its behavior and limit the number of promotions targeting students," Huang said. The association is the official bridge to all of Taiwan's banks, public and private.

  But banks such as Chinatrust -- the largest issuer of credit cards in Taiwan -- don't appear to be heeding the appeal.

  At present, Chinatrust has deals with nine schools to issue cards branded with the university name. And the schools -- keen to beef-up university coffers -- are all too ready to encourage the use of their university-branded cards on campus.

  For example, Taiwan's top university -- National Taiwan University -- promotes the cards to all its students and skims a sweet 1.5 percent of total sales from the Chinatrust deal, according to a former university official.

  Multiply that number by China-trust's 90,000 student cards in circulation and the attraction becomes obvious.

  And for those students who failed to do their homework and read the fine print of the card's minimum payment agreement, Chinatrust passes out the lesson university educators have yet to teach -- financial responsibility.
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