Many universities throughout the United States have quite the intimate relationship with major credit card issuers, according to an investigation by the aptly named Huffington Post Investigative Fund.

The publication obtained and scoured a number of “affinity agreements” between the credit card companies and universities, which must now be made public thanks to the new credit card rules.

However, getting your hands on them still seems to be quite a task (as expected), but what they found was definitely worth their time and energy.

Here are some of the key findings:

- Many universities are contractually obligated to share students’ personal info
– Some schools are paid $1 for each student who keeps a credit card open for 90 days
– Certain schools are paid $3 more per credit card when the student carries debt
– Some are paid 0.4% of all retail purchases made with the student credit cards

Based on their research, Bank of America appears to dominate the market, with roughly 700 schools believed to have affinity agreements with the banking giant.

In 2003, the University of Michigan agreed to $25.5 million for an 11-year contract with BofA, while Brown University accepted $2.3 million for seven years back in 2006.

And I’m sure the numbers are just going up – but the schools insist they need the money to pay for all the costs of running campus programs and balancing budgets.

Just seems a bit overboard when there’s an incentive for your students to carry a credit card balance…they should teach students about credit cards and other types of loans before agreeing to market them.

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