For now, the focus is on college students. They are the at-risk group of credit card users that can be reached most efficiently, says project director Kimberly Gartner. Many students, headed into a credit-saturated economy, know distressingly little about how to manage debt.

Verret hopes more campus campaigns will soon spread across the country. Later, the project could target high school students and immigrants.

Getting all of the parties involved in the Credit Card Project to reach accord hasn't been easy.

Some, like Brown, fear that credit card debt is so high that it threatens the stability of the nation's economy. They emphasize scary-sounding numbers.

The percentage of college undergraduates with credit cards rose to 83 percent in 2001 from 67 percent in 1998, for example, while the portion of students with four or more cards shot up to 47 percent from 27 percent.

But such data can be viewed in different ways.

Many economists, including some who have advised the project, don't agree that credit card debt has become a serious hazard to the health of the country's economy. Instead, they emphasize the advantages of bringing the credit system to more consumers.

Project participants also had to get past the concerns of Rhein and his peers at other card issuers.

"He was so defensive in the beginning," says Brown. "He'll tell you he came in because he was so worried about what we were going to do."

The issuers worry that their critics will push for and get laws and rules that make it much harder for issuers to run profitable credit card operations.

Rhein says he went into the project seeing the credit card business mostly as a numbers game. From that perspective, Wells Fargo views a net loss rate of 6 percent on its credit card business as "acceptable."

But then he put faces behind the numbers and grew more sensitive to the plight of the many consumers in the 6 percent group.

Eventually, everyone involved in the project agreed that more consumer education would lower the likelihood of such difficulties.

The project's Web site features tips for credit card users, links to other consumer education sites and a primer on how credit bureaus assign ratings or "scores" to credit card users and other borrowers. The lower the credit score, the tougher it becomes for a borrower to use credit to buy goods and services.

A "know your score" page on the site shows how and why a typical student's score moved up and down during her four years in college.

This year, backers turned to student newspapers at St. Cloud State and Hamline with ads encouraging students to learn how to manage credit card debt and keep their credit scores high. These marketing campaigns included door signs and car stickers boosting credit card literacy.

Common Ground