Credit Card Feud : Humanities Not a Major to Bank On

Back in the 1960s, the hot issues at UC Berkeley were free speech and the Vietnam War. Today, it’s equal access to credit cards.

The new controversy erupted this week when the campus newspaper disclosed that Citibank, the nation’s largest bank and biggest purveyor of credit cards, has regularly denied credit cards to students who majored in humanities.

The New York bank has marketed its MasterCard and Visa credit cards on college campuses for four years, even setting up tables to hand out applications at Berkeley and a few other select universities beneath signs that proclaim, “No Previous Credit History Required.”

But throughout the period, the bank has routinely rejected students who list majors in the humanities, such as English, history or art. The bank’s basic rationale is that these students are less likely to repay debts because they will not land the high-paying jobs that go to business or engineering graduates.

“It’s obvious discrimination,” said Molly F. Sorkin, an art history major turned down by Citibank shortly before her graduation in December. “A friend who majors in business got one as a freshman, and they are raising her credit limit to $6,000.”

Beating a Retreat

For Citibank, which counts a million college students among its 18.2 million credit card customers, the controversy is embarrassing, and the bank is beating a hasty retreat from the policy.

“This story is a nightmare,” one official at the New York headquarters said Wednesday.

Another bank official, Bill McGuire, said the company has been phasing out a student’s major as a factor in determining credit worthiness following complaints from around the country. But he defended the past use of a student’s major as a factor.

“In the absence of a credit history, we looked at field of study as one indicator of an individual’s ability to repay debt,” he said.

The controversy started when Citibank refused a MasterCard to Kennedy K. S. Yip, 22, a senior rhetoric major at Berkeley.

Yip already had an American Express card and Visa cards from Bank of America and Citibank. American Express and B of A did not require him to list his major, and he got the Citibank Visa when he was a mathematics major at UC Santa Cruz.

After transferring to Berkeley and switching majors, Yip applied for a Citibank MasterCard with the idea of consolidating his cards with one bank. But on Feb. 13, he received a letter from Citibank that listed “field of study” as the sole reason for turning him down.

Angered by Reasoning

Yip said Wednesday that he was angered about the reasoning behind the denial. “In essence, they are telling me that rhetoric majors do not pay back their debts,” he said.

He posted signs about Citibank at the school and complained to a friend, Irene Chang, an English major who wants to become a journalist. Chang found other students with similar stories and decided to find out for herself by talking to a Citibank canvasser on campus.

“I told her that I was an English major and I had heard rumors about humanities majors being denied credit and I asked her what I should do,” Chang said Wednesday. “She told me that I could fake my major as business administration or engineering. She said lots of students lie about their majors.”

Chang wrote a story that appeared Monday in the Daily Californian, an independent campus paper.

Considered Legal

The law prohibits using race or sex in deciding credit. But Edwin L. Rubin, a law professor at Berkeley, said Citibank could legally consider a student’s major. But he questioned the social responsibility of the policy.

“With so many motivations for students to abandon the humanities and go into a professional career, it seems a pity and not responsible corporate behavior for a bank to send this additional signal,” he said.

Questions can also be raised about the value of a major as an indicator of success. Walter B. Wriston, head of Citibank for many years before his retirement in 1984, and Richard S. Braddock, its chief of retail banking, were history majors. The current chairman of parent Citicorp, John S. Reed, has degrees in science and American literature.