You Say "Student," We Say, "Income Source"

Some different thoughts come to mind when reading this note on how the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau sent warning letters to 17 colleges recently about their agreements with credit card companies that allow the companies to market to students.

There's certainly some relief that someone's watching schools that do this. There's also some relief that there are only about a fifth as many colleges that allow companies to market to their students as there were in 2009, when Congress passed a law boosting the disclosure requirements.

But there's some uneasiness in knowing that 17 of 25 randomly-selected colleges refused to provide copies of the contracts they have with the companies, as the law requires them to do. And the law doesn't mean that the CFPB has to be the one to make the request -- theoretically, I could mail as many requests for contracts as I have stamps and every college that receives one is legally required to send it to me. So could you.

And it's kind of gross knowing that colleges, which have already played a large role in helping their students acquire significant debt, allowed a business that is also a rather sizable player in the owing more money than you can pay game access to market to their students.

I mean, the college may exploit the student and student's family for money at just about every turn at a rate that jackrabbits past inflation and buys them things like the considered wisdom of Nicole "Snooki" Polizzi. But at least at the end of that the student gets a nicely lettered piece of paper with a pretty university seal and the student's own name on it that says he or she sat through four or more years of classes in a reasonably conscious state. The value of that piece of paper may shrink more and more every year as colleges build ever more esoteric and useless specialties, but at least when their own colleges exploit them, students do receive something.

But letting outsiders exploit them as well seems cheap and tawdry, like a significant other who expects you to make out with his or her friends as a part of the relationship. But then, Robert B. Parker's first published words -- "The office of the university president looked like the front parlor of a successful Victorian whorehouse" -- have always told more truth than people would have believed.