Amanda Fairbanks investigates SeekingArrangement.com, one of many sites to connect college students in debt to "sugar daddies" that offer financial aid in exchange for sex or companionship:
Debt-strapped college graduates weren't included in [founder Brandon Wade's] original business plan. But once the recession hit and more and more students were among the growing list of new site users, Wade began to target them. The company, which is headquartered in Las Vegas, now places strategic pop-up ads that appear whenever someone types "tuition help" or "financial aid" into a search engine. And over the past five years, Wade says he's seen a 350 percent increase in college sugar baby membership — from 38,303 college sugar babies in 2007 to 179,906 college sugar babies by July of this year.
Walter Russell Mead says the education bubble has to pop soon. Kay Steiger has mixed feelings about how the transactions are portrayed:
[P]erhaps framing “arrangements” in strictly transitional terms to pay off tuition isn’t a great way to present women who choose them. Talking about it this way takes away the agency some of the women enjoy feeling when they enter into an arrangement like this. Most of the arrangements discussed in this article are consensual relationships between adults. The stigma women may face for wanting to enter into an agreement like this—rather than presenting it as part of one’s sexuality—may be so great that women cite financial reasons instead.
Tracy Clark-Flory hones in on whether the women are prostitutes and the men, johns:
Rich men who want to buy sex can afford euphemisms. "Sugar daddy" can be one of those euphemisms, but not always. Yes, some men look for a "sugar baby" when they really just want sex, and the companionship thing is a front. But some really just want the companionship and sex never happens, and if it does, they may or may not see it as something they've directly purchased. … Most of us don't like to acknowledge the complex relationship between sex and money. Sex workers, however, claim these gray areas — sometimes to protect themselves from the law, and sometimes because it is just that complicated.
The Dish 