How to Earn Credit Card Points Paying College Tuition (Now That PayPal Key Is Gone)

Luckily, one of my kids’ colleges takes Visa or Mastercard with no credit card fee. Back when I originally wrote this post, that opened up a great opportunity: PayPal had a feature called PayPal Key that generated a Mastercard number you could use almost anywhere, funded through your linked PayPal balance or card. By linking a Chase Freedom card to PayPal and using PayPal Key to pay tuition, that spending would code as a PayPal purchase — which, during the right rotating quarter, meant 5x points instead of the normal 1.5x.

Update: PayPal discontinued PayPal Key in April 2022, so this exact trick no longer works. I’m leaving the original story here because the underlying question — how do you actually earn good points paying tuition — is still one of the most common ones I get, and there are still real ways to do it in 2026.

What still works in 2026

1. Ask if your school takes cards directly, with no surcharge. This is the best outcome by far, since you earn your card’s full rate (or work toward a sign-up bonus) with zero added cost. Many private colleges and universities do accept Visa/Mastercard/Amex outright — always check the bursar’s office before assuming you need a workaround.
2. Use a bill-pay service like Plastiq if your school charges its own card fee or doesn’t take cards at all. Plastiq charges roughly 2.9% to route the payment as a check or ACH transfer to the school. That fee will usually erase the value of everyday points earning, so it’s really only worth it if the spend helps you clear a lucrative sign-up bonus’s minimum spend requirement — do the math on the bonus value versus the 2.9% fee before using it.
3. Watch quarterly rotating bonus categories. Cards like the Chase Freedom Flex and Discover it periodically rotate in categories that can apply to a tuition-adjacent payment method, even if a direct “tuition” category is rare. It’s worth checking your card’s activated categories each quarter regardless.

Tuition bills are one of the few truly large, recurring expenses most households have — which is exactly why it’s worth a few minutes of research each semester to see whether you can turn that spend into points, rather than assuming the answer is automatically no.