Bob McCarty Writes

I just finished my appearance tonight on The Curtis Sliwa Show, a program broadcast on ABC Radio Network’s flagship station, 77 WABC in New York City and carried on stations ranging from Boston and Washington, D.C., to Los Angeles.

Curtis Sliwa

In my “Alert” post earlier today, I mentioned that host Curtis Sliwa and I would be talking about the ways colleges and universities are in cahoots with banks and credit card companies when it comes to offering credit cards to college students.  While a New York Times article (”The Debt Trap”) served as the conversation starter, the list of key points I made about the issue during my 10-minute segment includes the following:

• The basic offer: Banks are offering free t-shirts to college students who sign up for their credit cards.

• What happens next: The college students run up charges, thinking they’ll be able to pay them off later — when they get a job after graduation.

• Graduation day comes, and many of the students — especially today — find they cannot land a decent-paying job after college.

• College graduates can’t find jobs, because the banks that loaned them money in the form of credit are not extending credit to the business owners across the country who need to borrow money in order to grow their businesses and, in turn, hire college graduates.

• The same banks that have received billions of dollars in bailout money from the federal government are setting up tens of thousands — if not hundreds of thousands — of college students for financial difficulty at a minimum and, at worst, failure.

• Finally, I jokingly suggested a class-action lawsuit be filed by lawyers for the college students who’ve fallen prey to the credit cards for t-shirts tactic.  The suits target defendant(s)?  The banks, credit card companies and centers of higher education who benefited from the practice.  Sliwa thought it would be easy to sign people up — if, that is, a lawyer was interested in the case.

Agree or disagree?  Let me know.

[Note: Check back soon for a link to the podcast of the show.  As soon as they post it at The Curtis Sliwa Show web site, I'll add a link to it here.]

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UPDATE 1/03/09: The podcast of my appearance on The Curtis Sliwa Show Jan. 1 is available here.  My segment begins halfway — or 30 minutes — into the podcast.]