Any student can tell you that the first thing they get in the mail when they return to campus is a wad of offers from credit card companies. But what most students and their parents did not know until recently was that colleges are behind the effort to get students to sign up for plastic.
Lucrative multi-million dollar contracts give colleges a kickback, so when a student applies for college the university also hopes they will apply for lots of credit cards. Buying all those pizzas or taking out emergency cash advances means big bonuses to colleges that reap as much as a dollar per student. But they can make even more if students carry a lot of debt and don’t pay it off right away. <