Washington ? More college students are overusing credit cards, academics and policy makers said this week as they urged Congress to do something about the problem.

“Often it’s their unknowing parents who end up dealing with the debt,” Ellen Frishberg, director of student financial services at Johns Hopkins University, told the Senate banking committee.

Eighty-three percent of undergraduates had at least one credit card last year, up from 67 percent in 1998, according to a study by Nellie Mae, a leading provider of student loans. The proportion of students with four or more credit cards jumped from 27 to 47 percent in that period, the study found.

The Education Department recently found that more than 44 percent of college students carried a balance on a credit card during the 1999-2000 school year. Among those students, the average credit card debt was $3,066. It was the first year such data was collected.

Robert Manning, an economic sociologist at the Rochester Institute of Technology, testified that credit card companies were increasingly marketing to freshmen.

“It means that the debt burden is going to show up earlier,” Manning said. “It means that retention in college is going to be affected.”

He said some of the nation’s universities were contributing to the problem by entering into financial contracts with credit card companies. For example, the University of Tennessee has a seven-year, $16.5 million contract with First USA that gives the company information about the university’s students.

At Kansas University, officials have prohibited credit card companies from distributing applications to students on campus from Aug. 15 to Sept. 5. The policy is similar to a proposal tabled in June by the Kansas Board of Regents.

“Credit card solicitation on campus at the beginning of the academic year can cause new students, especially freshmen, to make inappropriate decisions about making purchases on credit,” said David Shulenburger, executive vice chancellor and provost at KU.