Clark Kauffman has a followup story to his excellent Des Moines Register piece yesterday on campus credit card marketing. Today's followup story University data deals shroud money shows how the big banks sign contracts with alumni associations, which then sign contracts with the schools, in efforts to keep the details of their relationships secret.

It was a roundabout way of doing things, but it's an approach Bank of America and other credit card companies have used at many U.S. schools. It enables some of the world's largest financial institutions to keep secret the amount of money they pay to use the assets -- and even the student athletes --of public universities.