College, the first sense of real freedom we all have. Hours away from home, living on our own, paying bills, adulting for the first time for many of us. One of the neat things many people do in college is open their first credit cards to start building credit. Credit, perhaps the most fundamental part of our economy here in the United States and across the world. Our currency is not backed up by a gold standard, but rather by credit.

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For years the Fair Isaac Corporation (FICO) has gathered and issued credit scores 300 to 850. The scores are not completely arbitrary as they tell whether a person is responsible with borrowing money or not, where the higher the scorer, the more credible the borrower. Data is gathered by Equifax, Transunion, and Experian, who all keep record of every person and their credit history. Payment history, amount borrowed, credit utilization, amount of revolving credit, age of accounts, and number of accounts, all have an impact on our FICO scores. A score above 750 is considered excellent. Unfortunately for many students, they only have loans in their credit history and ever-increasing balances, often resulting in lower FICO credit scores. A poor FICO score could make it harder to get loans to help with businesses, car purchases, and credit cards. People who have better scores, often receive perks such as lower interest rates and more exclusive cards that come with more benefits and cash back.

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The FICO scores have been the industry standard for the past thirty years, well that is all about to change as the Fair Isaac Corporation is seeking to update their scoring standards, reportedly calling it the UltraFICO Score. The reasoning behind the change is to try to give those with a few minor dings in their histories a way to have a higher score by integrating their banking activities factored into their final scores. Having longstanding accounts with a few hundred dollars in them, which have not been over drafted can now make your score go up tremendously. It will be exciting to see how the changes, planned to roll out in 2019, effect the economy as it is expected many scores will go up, increasing the borrowing power of thousands.

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While this may seem as a good thing for many of us, who may not have credit cards, but have managed our savings and checking accounts throughout high school, Ted Rossman of CreditCards.com has some worries, saying, “the possible unintended consequence of including bank account balances would be an increased focus on income and assets … Historically, your FICO score has been affected by how well you manage your money, not how much money you have.” If scores do start to take into consideration income and assets, many young people and migrants could be negatively affected by the changes.