My daughter is home on spring break. She got an unsolicited credit card application in the mail the other day, addressed to her home address here in Michigan.

The interesting thing about that pitch is that it was marketed not just to college students, but to their parents.

A snippet from the “message to parents” enclosure:

Going to college is a big step in the life of a student - and in the lives of the parents as well. As you know, life on a college campus is full of new experiences, new challenges, new emergencies. So it’s only natural for parents to want to help as much as possible. And one way to help students deal more responsibly with some of the financial situations they are likely to face these days on a college campus is help them learn how to use their own checking accounts and their own credit cards, issued in the students’ own names - so they can have a monthly record of their own purchases and cash withdrawals and learn to budget accordingly.

Oh, it gets better. More ad copy …

Statements can be mailed to the home address so that students may talk with their parents about responsible credit usage, the importance of making timely payments and whether to “freeze” credit lines at specified levels or have credit lines increase automatically as students demonstrate their ability to handle credit. ..

Now, why do you want to send a credit card statement home unless Mom and Dad are paying the bill?

It could be, especially for out-of-state students, that sending the bills home is a convenient arrangement for parents to help with expenses. My mother and I had a co-signed department store card when I was in college, with the bill sent to my parents’ address, and that plan worked pretty well for us.

The disadvantage with this plan is - the students don’t see the line item report for their expenses and don’t learn how the numbers compound over time.

Another clip from that marketing campaign:

It’s also a lifesaver in time of emergency (and a comfort to parents to know that when students are away from home and need a dentist or a prescription medicine or a new car battery, etc. - they don’t have to feel abandoned because they can’t reach you on the telephone) because, in time of emergency students can simply reach for their (company name here) credit card.

Hmmm…. I have a much more practical solution for my family’s out-of-pocket medical bills. They are paid by a Flexible Spending Account. The FSA card works at every doctor’s office and drugstore we’ve been to. But it can’t be used for, say, an emergency pizza. I actually did try to use the FSA card for something else by accident. One day, I stuck the FSA card in a gas pump, mistaking it for my ATM card, and got the message “card denied.”

And in case of a travel emergency? Well, that actually happened to me as a college student and I found another solution. The story was that my boyfriend and I were stranded on a road trip in 1986 when his motorcycle broke down. Both of our bank accounts were “out-of-state” compared to where we got stranded, and today’s bank networks were not yet networking. Therefore we could not access our money.

Neither of us had a credit card.

I contacted my mother by telephone. Yes, I did reach her, long distance, in an emergency, in the days before cell phones. And she WIRED US BUS TICKETS back to my campus!

From the ATM at my student union, I was able to get into my bank account, give my boyfriend some money so he could head back to his place on another bus ticket, and our problem was solved. (We made another trip the following week, this time with cash in our pockets, to repair and retrieve the motorcycle.)

Now back to this credit card appeal. From the cover letter to the students:

We look forward to being your bank of choice for many years to come.

Oh, yes, I bet you do. But it’s not going to happen.

You see, I read the mouse print in that contract. I’ve also read the PBS special report Secret History of the Credit Card. So I know what that mouse print means and was able to explain to my daughter why that particular credit card offer was not in her best interest.

And while this offer did not come from Citibank, for further reading, college students and parents may also want to click to DebtFree Revolution’s post “I hate Citibank.”