NEW YORK – With college graduates increasingly unable to find well-paying jobs after graduation, the dating website SeekingArrangement.com is gaining market share by appealing to millennials looking for a wealthy “Sugar Daddy” willing to help pay off their student loan debts, typically in return for sexual favors.
“Facing a lifetime of debt slavery, the millennial generation is doing whatever they can to avoid homelessness,” noted the widely read economics blog ZeroHedge.com, drawing attention to statistical evidence that since 2009, the number of student sugar daddies has grown by 1,200 percent.
“Whether its stripping or working at Rent a Gent, all options are open, ZeroHedge.com continued. “Now they are flocking to SeekingArrangement.com to prostitute themselves so they can pay for school.”
The SeekingArrangement.com homepage says finding a sugar daddy means “unpaid bills no longer have to be a concern” and you can “indulge in shopping sprees, expensive dinners, and exotic travels.”
ZeroHedge.com points out the millennials facing enormous tuition loan debts and looking for a sugar daddy is not limited to women, as 15 percent of “sugar babies” are men, and “Sugar Mommas” advertise on the site along with “Sugar Daddies.”
The Denver Post reported an increased registration on SeekingArrrangement.com, coming largely from among the state’s university population.
“There are more than 2,700 sugar daddies registered with Seeking Arrangement in the Denver area and 202 sugar mamas, according to the website,” the Denver newspaper reported. “More than 15,300 Denver women – some college students, some not – are using the site as a sugar baby, and nearly 2,300 Denver men are registered sugar babies, too.”
The Village Voice reported that according to data released by SeekingArrangement.com in 2015, more than 1,000 undergraduates and graduate students at New York University alone, some 2.6 percent of the school’s 45,000 full-time students, had active accounts at SeekingArrangement.com. It is more than any other American college listed in the report, topping Columbia at 1.8 percent, the New School at 1.7 percent and CUNY at 0.25 percent.
More than 1,000 college students from Indiana are currently signed up on SeekingArrangement.com using their university email addresses, WTTV in Indianapolis reported. The television station noted sugar babies receive an average allowance of $3,000 a month from sugar daddies.
The Village Voice article noted SeekingArrangement.com, the largest and oldest of the matchmaking websites, had 2.6 million registered sugar babies listed in 2015, with half of those registered being college students.
Does a college education pay off?
A key dimension of the growing crisis in college education is the increasing evidence that, contrary to conventional wisdom, a college education will not necessarily lead to a high-paying job.
In April, the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis published a chart showing that the civilian labor force participation among those aged 25 years and older with a bachelor’s degree or higher has dropped from just over 80 percent approximately a quarter-century ago, in 1992, to just under 75 percent today.
The Washington-based Economic Policy Institute reported in 2015 that since the economic downturn officially ended in June 2009, seven classes of college students have graduated “into an acutely weak labor market and have had to compete with more-experienced workers for a limited number of job opportunities.”
The EPI concluded that since 2000, college graduates have confronted “suboptimal labor market conditions, resulting in stagnant wages and limited job opportunities,” with wages for university graduates 2.5 percent lower than they were 15 years ago.
Tuition loan debt crisis building
According to data the New York Times published, college-tuition costs have grown an alarming 500 percent between 1982 and 2007, while median family income has risen only some 150 percent in the same time period.
As a result, total outstanding tuition loan debt has risen from $500 billion in 2006 to $1.3 trillion in 2014, according to the Federal Bank of St. Louis.
In March 2013, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York reported that balances of student loans have eclipsed both auto loans and credit cards, making student loan debt the largest form of consumer debt outside mortgages.
With the default rate currently at estimated 27 percent and rising for student loans in repayment, rising tuition costs have pushed up the number of student loan borrowers from just over 20 million in 2004 to just under 40 million in 2012. The average balance per borrower rose from approximately $15,000 in 2001 to just under $25,000 in 2014.
Meanwhile, the federal government has gone from zero participation in student loans in 1993 to being responsible for $800 billion in student loans in 2014, according to data from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. The change resulted largely through legislation advanced by the Obama administration and passed by the Congress in 2010, transforming the student loan program in the United States from a largely bank-financed operation to federal government control over student loans.
Today, the U.S. Treasury Department calculates that student loans now make up a surprising 37 percent of the total $3.2 trillion in assets held by the federal government.
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