Predatory Promotions
Have any of you noticed the MBNA tents outside of memorial stadium or the booths in the Assembly Hall where MBNA gives out free t-shirts, towels, blankets, etc, in exchange for your filling out a credit card application? I use to kind of giggle to myself when I walked by these, because they reminded me of my old roommate. He had the worst credit in history, so bad that when i went with him to buy a car the salesman laughed at him. This guy use to fill out all of these things and collect the free t-shirts and other gifts, saying he was impervious because he is "Bad Credit Man" so he gets the free stuff, but there's no chance they'll actually approve him for any of the cards. These credit card sign ups worked out ok for him, but I think they are pretty bad for most of the normal students on campus.
MBNA is a sponsor of Illinois Athletics, and I'm assuming part of the deal is that they are given access to our students through these tents and booths at athletic events. I think it is inappropriate for the university to contract away access to the student body, especially to an industry as predatory as credit card companies.
Apart from MBNA, I think other RSO's do credit card fundraisers where they give out promotional items in exchange for people completing credit card applications, and then the credit card company gives the RSO some money for each completed application. I think this practice should also stop.
I think the Alumni Association might also have a credit card deal where they try to get current students to sing up for a U of I Alumni Association credit card, where the alumni association gets some money from the card, but much less than the parasite credit card company takes from students. If this is going on, it's particularly troubling because the Alumni Association has access to data like our email addresses, campus addresses, and permanent addresses.
I've asked Allan Niemerg to do a little preliminary research on these issues and get back to us. If you're interested in giving him a hand drop him a line at: niemerg@uiuc.edu
Personally, I think college students are particularly vulnerable targets for credit card companies, we are learning to budget for ourselves for the first time, we have limited incomes, several big expenses like textbooks that we can get lots of "reward points" for from various companies. I would like these any university sanctioned promotions on campus of any credit card companies to end, and RSO fundraisers with credit card companies to be banned from campus.
Please post your thoughts on this issue.
Joshua
posted by Illinois Student Senate | 3:59 PM
4 Comments:
If the alumni association is advertising the MBNA credit card to students it should probably stop. The average American household makes about 45k a year and is in about 9k of credit card debt alone. The habits people learn in college carry on into the real world. The question is, do we want financialy healthy alumni or do we want alumni who sunk themselves into credit card debt in college? We need to start educating students on credit card debt and prevent and institutional support of credit card companies on campus.
sorry, the above post was mine.
Hassen Al-Shawaf
I personally love credit, it is one of the primary engines of growth. The common man is smarter than us academic yuppies and our professors would ever admit, they know how to manage their finances better than some damn government...let them make their own damn decisions.
WJ Mills
Part of the problem is that over the past decade or so, credit card companies have shifted from only approving people with good credit to protect themselves from people getting into debt and then filing for bankruptcy, to the current climate where seventeen credit cards are given to every newborn baby and the bankruptcy laws have been gutted for everyone (except large corporations, of course).
This isn't just a campus thing. That said, the university should by no means condone it.
Also, I've noticed an increase in the amount of calls I get about credit cards. This is my fourth year in the dorms, and I'd really appreciate it if the university would put all the phonelines it controls, especially the 332- numbers, on the Do Not Call list, and update it every five years, so that students don't have to deal with this predation.
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