This is one of those ones that is a grey area. FICO scores were introduced in 1989. That at least gives a hard metric. Yes, it is screwy that parents have to get cards for kids; however, before the FICO score when you would apply for credit, your general credit history would still be pulled -- but as a massive amount of documents and info. Then the person making the decision would decide, arbitrarily, if you got the loan or not. These days, at least with FICO if someone is trying to be biased: then it shows. Great credit, but denied because of an ethnic sounding name -- you can do something about it with the metric. Before, nope. The persons decision was arbitrary and final.