SeekingArrangement.com, a website that pairs female co-eds with wealthy older men eager to compensate them for their company, today released its annual ranking of the 20 fastest-growing “sugar baby” schools – and two Pennsylvania universities made the cut.
Philly’s Temple University came in at number three on the list, which is based on the number of new female student sign-ups to the site in 2012. Temple enrollments to SeekingArrangement increased by 237 percent to 268 students last year, propelling the school up from the number five spot it held in 2011.
“The population of college ‘sugar babies’ in Pennsylvania has steadily
increased every year, with Temple leading all major universities this
year,” SeekingArrangement founder Brandon Wade said in a statement. “While some may argue that these women are just using
men for their own personal gain, I believe that they are proactive in
pursuing a higher education.”
Penn State University, which ranked number 13 last year, was this year number 12 when it came to the number of “sugar babies,” with 121 sign-ups representing a 168 percent increase over 2011.
Though the University of Pennsylvania didn’t make the top 20, it still came in at number 58 with a 533 percent increase in enrollment.
SeekingArrangement cited the rising price of tuition and related expenses as one possible reason for the spike in sign-ups, pointing to a Bloomberg Businessweek statistic estimating the average cost of each student loan to be about $25,250.
“College should be an opportunity to expand the mind and experience new
things,” Wade said. “Unfortunately, because of the of recent tuition
hikes, the college experience has become greatly unbalanced.”
The site claims to help offset this imbalance by pairing cash-strapped female students with wealthy older “benefactors” who they say help the women pay for their education. What exactly goes down between them is at the discretion of each pair of consenting adults.
Temple was shut out of the “fastest growing sugar baby school” title by Georgia State University, which jumped
from number 11 in 2011 to number one this year, and New York University, which topped the list
last year, but fell to number two.
Seeking Arrangement, which bills itself as “the world’s largest Sugar Daddy website,” saw a 58 percent nationwide increase in college student sign-ups in the past year. The percentage of users enrolled to the website who are students rose from 40 percent in 2011 to 44 percent in 2012.
