The General Accountability Office (GAO) has released a new report on banking and pre-paid debit cards at colleges and universities, and it calls on the Congress and the Department of Education to take action to solve three keys areas that their report takes issue with.

In recent years, campus banking relationships have faced scrutiny following a critical report by the Public Research Interest Group (PIRG) that said the programs take advantage of students. The GAO report looks at the fees that the programs charge students, ATM accessibility and the programs' transparency – or lack thereof. According to CR80news.com, a publication on campus cards and college and university identification and security, industry experts are not surprised by the report's conclusions and most responded favorably to the GAO's report over the PIRG analysis, saying that particular report was “highly judgmental.” Still an issue, however, is the problem of differentiating student banking and financial aid dispersal.

According to the GAO report, as of July 2013, at least 852 schools, or 11 percent of U.S. colleges and universities, had agreements to provide debit or prepaid card services to their students. In the majority of agreements, the schools outsourced to their card provider the process for paying financial aid and other funds via college cards and other methods. Some schools also used college cards as student identification. The dominant provider was Higher One, a nonbank financial firm that had a 57 percent market share in 2013, as measured by number of card agreements.