Help! Dad's doing plastic surgery!

American Demographics, August, 1991 by Blayne Cutler

DONNA BLEZNAK COULDN'T believe her father did it. One night, he got fed up with her younger sister Missy, a student at the Art Institute of Philadelphia, and gave her plastic surgery.

"Missy was somewhere between laughing and crying," says Donna, who witnessed the whole affair. "She had used her plastic for a couple of big Japanese dinners with her friends. Now my father is keeping a close watch on her bills. He gives her the card only for emergencies."

Major credit-card companies are fighting to sign up college students, one of the last unsaturated markets in their industry. But some companies are beginning to wonder whether the college students they're helping are really the ones paying the bill at the end of the month.

"Physically, the students are paying the bills," says Stuart Himmelfarb. His annual CollegeTrack survey finds a 37 percent increase in general credit-card ownership for full-time undergraduates at four-year colleges between 1988 and 1990. The lion's share (90 percent) of card-holding students report that credit cards and bills are listed in their own names. But Himmelfarb is also preparing proprietary studies that give full details on students' financial sources.

Credit cards are "one of the most competitive business categories on campus," says Himmelfarb. The companies are clearly interested in students. The trend has been to encompass more schools."

With 9.1 million full-time students spending about $60 billion a year, including $13 billion in discretionary spending, credit-card companies are willing to take some risks. "Banks are not asking for co-signatures anymore," says Himmelfarb. Almost three-quarters of full-time undergraduates have at least one card, according to estimates by Credit Card News. Forty-two percent of students have a department store credit card, and 23 percent have a gasoline card.

"Full-time students generally do not have a full-time job," says Gail Wasserman, a spokeswoman for the 13-year-old American Express Student Program. "More often than not, students also have no credit history. We don't expect students to meet the same financial criteria as other cardmembers."