Student credit card offer

The Nevada chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union has sent a stern letter to the University of Nevada, accusing school administrators of violating federal privacy rules by setting student names and addresses to MBNA, a financial services/credit card company.

The ACLU took action late last year after a student at the Community College of Southern Nevada received an unsolicited credit card offer that annoyed her. Wondering how a credit card company knew her address and her status as a student at the university, she told her story to the press. Several other students complained to the media after her comments were published, notes Thomas Ray, general counsel for Nevada's university and community college system. "The Board of Regents is trying to balance a source of revenue for the university with student privacy," he says. While Ray will not reveal how much the university earns by selling student names, he explains that money earned from list sales is poured back into student programs and services. According to the ACLU's letter, the University of Nevada has sold student directory information--names, addresses, telephone numbers, date of birth--to MBNA. But Ray explains that the university system has the legal right to sell basic student directory information, unless while providing data, a student indicates that it should be held confidential.

Still, the regents acknowledge this is a sensitive issue. They are slated to discuss student data and its relationship with credit card companies at a March 6 meeting. Whether the ACLU will take further action is unclear; repeated calls to the Nevada office were not returned.

One source, however, offers perspective on the issue. Robert Manning is the Gannett Professor of Humanities at the Rochester Institute of Technology, and author of the book Credit Card Nation: The Consequences of America's Addition to Credit (Basic Books). According to Manning, nearly every major college and university has teamed with a credit card company to offer school-branded credit cards to students and alumni. Financial. officers are marketing school-endorsed credit cards "as an expression of school spirit," Manning told University Business. And because each charge on a card yields a university or college commission that can range from four-tenths to half a percentage point, he estimates the top 300 colleges and universities will earn $1 billion on such credit card deals by the end of the decade. That may be money worth fighting for.