Focused freewriting: College debt

I wonder how many trees are killed for paper offers of pre-approved credit cards for college students. I get a new offer daily from a credit card company that wants to give me a card, but I don’t understand how a college student can be pre-approved when s/he has no credit history—I suppose that’s the trap: the company offers you a low or no-interest credit card with low monthly minimum payments so you can build some credit and they give you an absurdly high limit to encourage you to spend all the money you don’t have then they yank the carpet out from under you when your rates skyrocket after six months . . . and you’re a poor recent college graduate with no means of paying off the bills, and then you have to borrow money to pay off these debts but that just leaves you with more debt (haven’t there been some students who committed suicide because they owed so many companies so much money and had no way to pay?) and all of this means that your newfound credit history is doomed from day one unless you actually read the fine print and can avoid getting addicted to your new plastic friend, which most college students can’t do.

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