When credit card vendors at UC Davis hand students an application, they also must hand them a brochure with a cautionary example about debt: "If your card has a balance of $1,000 with 18.5 percent interest and you pay the minimum each month, it will take 13 years to pay it off."

Mandating that vendors provide the UC Davis brochure to potential card applicants is one of the ways the campus educates students on the wise use of credit and curbs aggressive marketing of credit cards on campus.

With vendor guidelines in place for more than three years, the university is ahead of state legislation that, as of January, will ask UC campuses and require community colleges and California State University to adopt policies to regulate the marketing of credit cards on campuses.

At institutions of higher education and beyond, there is concern that credit card companies aggressively pursue students who soon find themselves with unmanageable debt.

While concluding that most full-time undergraduates who have credit cards use them responsibly, a national study prepared for EdFund found that 10 percent have excessive debt or are at risk of acquiring it -- with more than three credit cards or credit limits of $5,000 or more.

To offer some protection to students, UC Davis requires vendors, who pay a fee, to be employees of a recognized marketing company, to stay with their display in an assigned location and to distribute the brochure; the campus prohibits vendors from approaching students and from giving away free merchandise such as T-shirts and phone cards.

Under the UC Davis program, an average of three vendors a day have displays on campus. Brisk business in the fall could net a vendor as many as 90 applications a day.

According to the EdFund study, only 15 percent of students acquired their first credit card through on-campus displays. But why allow the vendors on campus at all?

"We're hoping we can educate the students along the way," says Sheri Canevari, who oversees the vendor program and monitors compliance as advertising and marketing manager at the UC Davis Bookstore. She adds that providing an opportunity to sign up for a credit card is a valuable service to the student who uses a card wisely.

The Office of Financial Aid addresses credit card use in some of its presentations to students and offers drop-in counseling for those who find themselves in financial difficulty.