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Citibank-ForwardSM-for-College-Students

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The Citi Forward® Card for College Students offers 5 points per $1 spent where it counts for college students: dining, books and textbooks, movies, and music. This makes it the best rewards card out there for college students.

The Citi Forward® Card for College Students also offers a 1,000 point bonus for signing up, if you sign up for paperless billing in the first 3 months, and no annual fee. They also reward you 100 points each month if you pay on time and stay under your credit line.  These 100 points per month are not included in the 75,000 point cap.

The only gripe is that Citi ThankYou Points are annoyingly hard to redeem at 1 cent per point. You have to save up 10,000 points to get a $100 retail gift card at a limited number of merchants. If you can’t wait for 10,000 points, expect to get a bit less than 1 cent per point – you can redeem 6,000 points for a $50 gift card at a very wide selection of restaurants and stores.

As of October 2011, Citi has improved their point redemption options! You can now redeem 2,500 points for a $25 retail gift card at a reasonable number of retailers.

  • Val

    This card is great for San Fran, especially since I’m always eating out.

  • http://twitter.com/patz2009 Patrick Connor

    I’d love to get this card and start racking up rewards for all the eating out I do, but Citi seems to try to find every reason to deny me. I don’t know what kind of credit history they’re expecting a student to have (mine’s immaculate), but whatever they’re looking for their standards are too high.

    • TheDeclineOne

      I completely agree with you. Apparently they want me to send a sperm sample and check my DNA before i can get approved.

  • Anon

    I applied with this card, ~700 credit score, $25k yearly income, $20k in student loans and I was denied, and I quote “because I didn’t have a revolving credit account.”

    GARBAGE

  • Guest

    Do you HAVE to be a college student to get this card? I’m 19 and took a bunch of AP and Dual-enrollment courses in high school, so I have about 1.5 semesters of college credit. Does that count? I think the purpose of this card is more for college-AGED students, who have no credit history. Like me…

    • http://www.nerdwallet.com/ NerdWallet

      A customer service representative told us to apply for the regular Citi Forward if you aren’t specifically a college student, but that isn’t always indicative of company policy. We’re still waiting to hear back from a media representative, but in the meantime, applying for the regular Forward is probably fine, especially if you’ll be having a co-signer anyway.