By Shiri Revital Bilik Ask Nicole about her first credit card, and she'll say it all started innocently enough. "I started out freshman year with a card that had a $500 limit," the U-M senior says. "I kept telling myself that if some sort of emergency comes up, $500 just wouldn't be enough."

Photo by Marcia Ledford, U-M Photo Services Students have graduated carrying bigger burdens of credit card debt in recent years, studies show. But their delinquency rate still is under that of U-M alumni, says the Alumni Association's Jerry Sigler.

An emergency never came up. Instead, there were dinners out, new clothes and on-line purchases. Pretty soon, Nicole stopped paying the principal on her credit card bills, and by junior year, she had amassed $6,000 in debt.

According to the Nellie Mae Foundation's 2000 survey, one in 10 undergraduates will finish college with credit card balances exceeding $7,000. Other undergraduates aren't far behind: On average, they carry balances of nearly $3,000, more than double the average in 1993.

Danielle, also a senior, owes $4,500. She says the pressures she felt coming to U-M from a working class background aggravated her spending. "All of a sudden, you're surrounded by so much wealth," Danielle says. She felt she needed to catch up with her wealthier peers, who went to concerts, museums and abroad.

For Nicole, much of the debt arose when she decided to keep her psychological care a secret from her parents. As a result, she took on the cost of her anti-depressants without insurance.

Although they say much of their spending was necessary, both women take responsibility for their debt. But, they say, constant solicitation by credit card companies made owning a card harder to resist.

"No matter where you are on campus," Nicole says, "you just can't avoid credit cards."

Two decades ago, no credit card company would have taken Danielle or Nicole on. With comparatively miniscule yearly incomes, college students weren't considered profitable candidates. By the late '80s, however, with other markets already saturated, most banks removed the co-signer requirement for customers younger than 21.

Colleges soon joined the bandwagon. Seven years ago, in return for a percentage of credit card purchases, the U-M Alumni Association gave credit card distributor MBNA the right to market credit cards with the U-M trademark. Jerry Sigler, associate executive director of the Association, says the University receives only about $100,000 annually from credit card sales to students and contributes about half to student programs, including emergency loan funds for students who get into credit card trouble.

Sigler says that on the whole, U-M students are financially responsible. "U-M students have a lower delinquency rate than credit card holders in general," he says, "even better than the alumni."

Some experts say, however, that with smaller incomes than adults, students easily find themselves in trouble. This trend recently sparked national legislation that, if passed, would limit credit lines to 20 percent of a student's annual income.

The bill's sponsor commissioned the General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress, to research student credit card debt. It found that credit card debt becomes especially serious as students leave college and begin to repay their student loans.

After Nicole graduates this spring, she'll start paying back two loans: her student loan and the one she took out to cover her debt. But, she says, she's more concerned about her ruined credit rating. Recently, she paid an on-line company to review her financial history. The company charged $14 to her VISA.