When did you turn 18? I started college in August 1999 and nobody I knew had any trouble getting a credit card. Many fraternities and sororities used credit card applications to freshmen as fundraisers. It was typically a $1000-$1500 credit limit. Some people I knew had $10k in credit card debt by the time they graduated...

I turned 18 about two years ago. Things might be different now because of the credit CARD act of 2009 which makes it slightly harder to take advantage of younger people (giving a $1500 card to people who have never had credit before and don't know how important it is to pay off the balance in full seems particularly evil)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credit_CARD_Act_of_2009

>Consumers under the age of 21 must prove that they have an independent income or get a co-signer before applying for a credit card. The Act also prevents credit card companies from ... wooing students with T-shirts, free pizza and other free gifts at university-sponsored events

Well at least the interest rate was only around 30% </s>.

[edit] The end of the story for me:

The credit card I got from that was amazingly bad. I had a bill put in the wrong mailbox in my dorm, so didn't get it until 3 days before it was due. I called up customer service:

Me: I can mail this today, but it is unlikely to make it there by the due date, I've always paid my bills on time, can I get a 1 week extension

CS: We can do an ACH for $20 or you will pay a late fee if the check you mail is even a day late.

Me: Seriously?

CS: Yes

Me: Okay, do that and cancel my account.

CS: Okay.

It's like they didn't even want me as a customer if I was going to pay my bills every week. Not a single attempt to retain me when I canceled my account. At this point, I had a Discover card, the CS reps for which were very kind, and my bank had just gotten my debit card on the Mastercard network (previously it was only an ATM card), so I had no absolute need for their card. Had this happened a few months earlier I might not have been willing to cancel as so many places don't take Discover.

> It's like they didn't even want me as a customer if I was going to pay my bills every week.

I semi-suspect you know this, but if you pay in full every month, they don't get to bundle your debt up and sell it off as a security. Interchange fees are competitive enough that it's probably close to break even (and getting more so every year), but the securities are comparatively pretty sweet for the issuers.

While you're probably correct its worth remembering that credit-card companies get their money from both sides:

* They earn money via the interest people way if they don't settle their bills in-full, and on-time.

* But they also take money for handling transactions at terminals, etc.

>Things might be different now because of the credit CARD act of 2009 which makes it slightly harder to take advantage of younger people

No "might" or "slightly" about it. It's significantly different now. When I was 18 you only needed a faint pulse to get 10s of thousands of dollars in credit. People would hand out credit applications in dorm rooms, at events, in front of classrooms, just anywhere and everywhere you could think of. It was a different time.

While I did not get woo’ed, sadly enough, to get an unsecured credit card with Bank of America, all I needed to do was enter my personal information and some notion of income (without verification).

In less than a minute, BoA’s automated credit card application approved me and mailed out a $1000 limit card.

Yea this stuff changed drastically over the last 10 years. I got credit card limit that were like almost half of my (very low) annual income in 2007 with almost no history, while 4 years later my coworkers pulling >150k/yr couldn't get any credit card without doing the secured bullshit.

My brother-in-law got his first card in his early 20s, and around 2009. He had to go the route of getting a secured credit card, too. In his case, the issue was probably that he was trying to go for his first credit during the recession. He married my sister in 2010; they got their first apartment based on his income, but on her credit rating.

There was a change back in like 2006 or something that made it harder for college kids to get credit -- have to demonstrate income, which as we know most don't. Conversely, when I was in college creditors were mass calling dorms to get signups. One kinda tricked me into "allowing them to send me an application in the mail" and a pre-approved credit card showed up instead. I never used it till a few years after I got a paying gig, but it did kinda work as a means of building credit via account age.

Had you taken on college loans? I know that's how I established my credit and, once I had that in my history, they were all to happy to give me a card with an absurd limit (for me, at the time, with only a work-study job) with little more than my name and SSN.

It seems strange that taking on a ton of unsecured debt would make creditors think it's more likely that you'll be able to pay off even more unsecured debt, but that seems to be how the system works, or at least worked two decades ago when I was in school. Perhaps the emergence of for-profit colleges that don't really offer their graduates the kind of post-schooling opportunities that traditional colleges do has changed the way that college loans are perceived since they no longer reliably predict future earnings the way they used to.