Marty,
Today I received the third unsolicited credit card request from you asking that I sign up for a Texas A&M University MasterCard. To be quite honest, I do not want to receive any more of these advertisements, and contacting your name on the letter seems to be the most direct way to get off the list.
Aside from the pushiness implied by the number of times I have received these offers, my personal opinion on this matter is that sending credit card offers to students is really fairly disingenuous (at best) for a organization that claims to serve the student body at Texas A&M.
People graduating from any college, including Texas A&M, are typically in enough debt already without a card that has 15.99% variable APR and a variant of universal default sitting around to be used. Did you know that students using this card may have to pay additional fees if they are late on a different card from a completely different bank?
To add insult to injury, I know that 15.99% is by far not the best rate that could have been offered to students, since similar branded Bank of America cards have significantly lower rates. Take for example the 9.9% APR offered to users of The Motley Fool: http://www.applyonlinenow.com/us/tmf5/
Is promoting a card with unfriendly terms how the AFS is trying to take care of Aggies these days? I can certainly appreciate that the Association for Former Students is always looking for new revenue streams, but this is really over the top.
I hope to hear soon that I have been removed from this list and an explanation of why the AFS is doing more than making a money grab with this credit card offer. Is something like this credit card really worth alienating a generation of potential donors?
Thanks and Gig ‘Em,
William Reading
