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Dating for a degree: Some students are turning to sugar daddies to pay tuition

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Courtesy of SeekingArrangement.com

There are numerous ways to pay for a college education: scholarships, grants, loans, work-study, off-campus jobs and … sugar daddies?

That’s how some students are choosing to finance their degrees, with websites like SeekingArrangement.com, a Vegas-based sugar-daddy dating site that “matches wealthy benefactors seeking ‘mutually beneficial relationships’ with attractive members.”

Founded in 2006 by MIT grad-turned-entrepreneur Brandon Wade, SeekingArrangement now has more than 5 million users—and over 1.9 million of them are degree-seeking students, using the site’s collegiate-focused vertical, Sugar Baby University. Oh, and SeekingArrangement says 328 of those coeds are studying right here at UNLV.

A global entity (the site also maintains offices in Singapore and Ukraine), SeekingArrangement asserts its sugar babies receive an average monthly allowance of $3,000, which many are allegedly using to subsidize their tuition and other education costs. The service is being used everywhere from state schools like the University of Georgia to Ivy League institutions like Columbia University.

“Some see this as a controversial solution. However, SeekingArrangement.com has helped facilitate hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of arrangements that have helped students graduate debt-free,” says Wade on SeekingArrangement's website.

A representative says the site saw 55 new UNLV users in 2015 for an increase of 20 percent, and that’s not even the site’s highest surge among American universities. SeekingArrangement saw 225 new users at New York University last year, with significant spikes also at Arizona State (189), the University of Texas at Austin (163), Temple (155) and Kent State (153).

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