Story by Madison Odenborg
Illustration by Charlotte Cheng
“I made an account as a joke, just to see what it was like, but I quickly saw the appeal,” Catherine Smith*, a student at the University of Washington, says. “One guy offered me three thousand dollars a month plus shopping and airfare for vacations…it’s hard to turn that down.”
What prevented Smith from following through with an arrangement on the dating website SeekingArrangement.com was the ambiguity on whether or not the agreement was tantamount to prostitution.
“I didn’t want to feel dirty—I also didn’t want to hang out with an old guy in Palm Springs,” Smith adds.
However, college students across the country are turning towards the “sugar daddies” of the world for easy cash. A sugar daddy, according the lexicon of the site SeekingArrangement.com, is “a mentor, sponsor or benefactor.” Typically these are older, wealthy men looking for companionship.
“It’s hard to tell which guys are looking for what,” Smith says. “I don’t know if sexual activity is expected. The guys use really weird language, like they’re trying to romance you. They’ll sign the emails with phrases like ‘kisses’—it’s uncomfortable.”
According to the New York Times, SeekingArrangement.com is a “down-and-dirty marketplace” and a safe haven for older, moneyed men and cute young women to engage in acutely frank transactions. These young women are known as sugar babies, which SeekingArrangement.com defines as “an attractive, ambitious and goal oriented individual who has a lot to offer.”
“I’ve never had someone present me with money and gifts and promises without even speaking to me, it’s shocking people do that—just straight up offer you a yearly salary if you spend time with them,” Smith says.
Despite the taboo interactions, the casual sum of $60,000 a year for spending purposes and/or college tuition is evidently appealing. In an interview with The Huffington Post, Brandon Wade, the forty-one-year-old founder of Seeking Arrangement states, “Over the past few years, the number of college students using our site has exploded.” The site has an approximate 35% college student clientele and rewards users with an .edu email with premium access for no additional charge.
 
According to the Huffington Post, Seeking Arrangement lists the top 20 universities attended by sugar babies on the site. They compiled the list according to the number of sugar babies who registered using their .edu email addresses or listed schools’ names on their profiles. New York University tops the list with 498 sugar babies, while UCLA comes in at No. 8 with 253, and Harvard University ranks at No. 9 with 231. The University of California at Berkeley ranks at No. 13 with 193, the University of Southern California ranks at No. 15 with 183, and Tulane University ranks at No. 20 with 163 college sugar babies.
All six schools are highly regarded academic institutions, with low-percentage acceptance rates. These six schools also cost at least $55,000 per year for students out-of-state, with NYU at approximately $58,000 per year.  Although obtaining a loan is common, the debt that looms over most students can put a dent in the excitement of post-college life.
Amanda McCormick, a student at the University of Oregon, says that she would consider making a profile on a website like SeekingArrangement.com to fund these extra expenses.
“There are few jobs available to college students that have the potential to give as high of a pay out for such a small amount of time. The disadvantages are also extremely apparent and greatly outweigh the benefits,” McCormick says, “I do not consider being a sugar baby prostitution, although I do feel it may be a very strong gateway into prostitution if done under the wrong pretenses.”
What pretenses make this type of relationship okay? Katherine Cook, another UO student, says, “For those in college with living expenses and tuition to pay, [extra money is] even allowing them to better themselves.”
If the money is used to allow students to continue their education, is being a sugar baby justifiable? Is it more respectable to pave your own path to success? Or is being a sugar baby simply a means to pave that path?
Liza DeBoer works as a “house-mom” for a sorority on campus. She cooks, locks the doors at night, helps with first-aid, and counsels. Essentially, she is a mother for 64 young women at the university. DeBoer was homeless for a period of time as a teenager and admits that she is aware of the financial paralysis that many college students experience.
“Of course there are advantages such as money and gifts,” DeBoer says, “but they come at such a high cost. Personally I hold the sexual relationship as sacred. This sort of a relationship would certainly be detrimental to many women down the road.”
DeBoer explains that the sugar daddy relationship would “never be okay.” For others, it’s still a consideration, and even viewed as a statement on feminism.
“Why should women not be able to choose this lifestyle?” Cook adds. “The whole feminist movement is about equal rights for women and women being able to choose their own path.” In terms of the companionship that sugar daddy relationships entail, Cook believes, “These men are not simply objectifying these women—they know them on a more intellectual basis.”
Some may argue that it is the men who are being taken advantage of—that the students are evidently in the relationship for their money, and not their companionship.
This idea brings to light a comparable issue. “Think about women that marry for money. Are they prostitutes? No, they are considered gold diggers,” Cook says. “Sugar daddies are the same concept.”
The appeal is evident since loans inevitably await most graduates. A report by The New York Times states that about two-thirds of the class of 2010 graduated with student debt. The debate about whether or not sugar daddy relationships are considered prostitution will always remain until the sugar daddy phenomena unforeseeably perishes.
“I couldn’t actually do it,” admits Smith. “Part of being young is being broke. If you don’t want to accept that, I guess you can go hang out on a yacht with a 56-year-old man.”
 
*Name has been changed upon request to protect privacy.