The University of Iowa and Iowa State University are aggressively marketing credit cards to their students as part of an arrangement that generates millions of dollars for the institutions’ privately run alumni organizations, The Des Moines Register reported.

In one example, the newspaper said it had obtained records showing a deal in which the University of Iowa agreed to give a card-issuing bank contact information for students and their parents, as well as people who bought tickets to athletics events.

Officials of the universities and the alumni associations said the money they collected through the credit-card deals benefited the institutions and their students.

Such practices are widespread among American universities, the Register said, but have come under increasing scrutiny in the wake of investigations in the U.S. Senate and by the attorneys general of New York and other states into colleges’ relationships with student-loan companies and providers of study-abroad programs, among other businesses. At a forum sponsored by the American Council on Education last week on how to head off possible legal and ethical problems in all of their business relationships, college leaders identified credit-card-marketing arrangements as another possible area of concern. —Charles Huckabee