Collective confusion and student credit card
It is important to note that the media are among the most important sources of our collective confusion and misunderstanding of this social phenomenon. Indeed, reports in the mainstream press tend to deflect attention from the social implications of mass solicitation campaigns and omnipresent marketing by reporting on the extravagant spending sprees and compulsive shopaholic tendencies of atypical Americans. As banks embarked on marketing consumer student credit card after the 1981-1982 recession, sensationalist accounts of journalists (featuring condescending advice and a stern tone of reproval) helped to confuse public perceptions and conflate causes of debt with their deleterious consequences.
For instance, Money magazine profiled the spending patterns of Michael and Cynthia Proctor that led to their financial problem. According to the article, the "Proctors never asked for their first student credit card. Four of them more or less appeared pre-approved in the couple’s Huntsville, Texas, mail box in the summer of 1982. [In their late 20s, the couple] made $43,000 working for the Texas Department of Corrections. Michael was also studying nights for his master’s degree . . . But for all Michael’s schooling, the Proctors had never learned to control debt." The story described the Proctors’ three-year spending binge "’using student credit card for everything–whatever caught our fancy.’" The end came when they were unable to make the minimum payments on their nearly 60 credit accounts with an outstanding total debt of $34,500. Unlike many more typical households, which accumulated debt due to income disruptions and life-cycle crises in the 1980s, the Proctors’ financially cavalier behavior eventually compelled them to "forsake restaurants and entertainment more than once a month [and] end their bimonthly shopping trips to Houston." Such simple prescriptions, of course, defy the far more complex reality of the contemporary U.S. debtor society.
Similarly, the recent public attention to the growing debt and social problems associated with aggressive marketing of student credit card to college students has led to a plethora of local, regional, and national reports on the topic. From Oprah to The Simpsons, special programs have addressed the growth of student student credit card debt and highlighted the large number of accounts, mushrooming debt, and repentant attitudes. Students are portrayed as informed adults who accept the legal responsibility of student credit card under their own volition or free will. Banks are viewed as profit maximizers that are simply developing effective marketing campaigns; after all, their "job" is to loan money and make the highest possible profit for their shareholders. This neutral framing of the role of banks in this social problem ignores the fact that student credit card companies have abruptly changed their lending policies for unemployed students based on the lower risk assessment of this market niche. For example, parental cosignatures are no longer required, and banks have dramatically increased student student credit card lines without the traditionally required increase in income. This is because students pay their student credit card with other loans (family, federal education, private bank) and even other student credit card.