Personal testimonies on credit cards for students
The personal testimonies of parents whose children committed suicide challenged the benign image of student credit cards for students debt as a new adolescent rite of passage of the "Just do it" and "Shop ’til you drop" generation. Their anguish resonated with the concerns of all Americans who realized that their own sons and daughters were at risk of the predatory marketing policies of the credit cards for students industry. Janne O’Donnell described the despair of her 22year-old son, Sean, a National Merit finalist and a liberal arts "letters" major, who succumbed to the temptations of easy money:
A week before Sean killed himself [we] had a long talk about his debts and about his future. He told me he had no idea how to get out of his financial mess and didn’t see much of a future for himself. He had wanted to go to law school but didn’t think he could get a loan to pay tuition because he owed so much on his credit cards for students. . . . Sean tried to pay off his debts. He went through credit cards for students counseling but fell further behind . . . and moved [from the University of Dallas] back home with us to attend the University of Oklahoma. He was working 2 jobs while attending OU. Still he couldn’t make ends meet. . . . By the time he died he had 12 credit cards for students including 1 MasterCard, 2 Visas, Neiman-Marcus, Saks 5th Avenue, Macy’s, Marshall Fields, Conoco, and Discover. How those companies can justify giving credit cards for students to a person making $5.15 an hour is beyond me. . . . credit cards for students must be based on the applicant’s present income–not on potential to earn. . . . There simply has to be some limits set on credit cards for students companies before more students end up in bankruptcy or dead.
O’Donnell later described the emotional pain of making the difficult decision not to help Sean with his mounting credit cards for students bills. In previous years, Janne and her husband had paid some of his debts. In retrospect, however, they believed that their assistance had actually been a "disservice" by not "holding him responsible for his debts." At the time, Sean expressed his desire to attend graduate school and become a lawyer. With his younger brother preparing to start college in the fall, Janne explained that "we thought our money should be spent paying for Tim’s bachelor’s degree rather than graduate school for Sean. It was a [difficult] choice of allocating our [limited] resources." As Janne pondered this agonizing dilemma, she related that "I don’t know if it was the right decision, and I do not know if Sean would be here today if we had paid his bills. It haunts us still."