While millionaires are increasingly in short supply in the Garden State, demand for wealthy benefactors among Rutgers University students is on the upswing. Or so says the company behind the dating website designed to bring the two together.
In 2014, the number of Rutgers University students who joined seekingarrangement.com, whose backers tout it as the world’s largest “Sugar Daddy” dating site, rose by 32 percent, according to data released by the website.
Founded in 2006, the online dating website offers cash-strapped college students the chance to enter into what the company’s press kit says are “mutually beneficial” arrangements with more financially secure persons. Students are attracted to the website by the average $3,000 in monthly “allowances” provided by their matches.
A total of 317 Rutgers students have registered profiles with seekingarrangement.com, a spokesperson for the site said. How many of those are active users is unclear. The number represents less than one percent of the university’s total population of enrolled students, which stands at 40,720 for the 2014-2015 school year.
Still, with last year’s growth, Rutgers has shot into the top-50 on the website’s annual ranking of fastest growing “Sugar Baby Schools,” which was released by the website last week.
The rising cost of tuition at Rutgers and universities nationwide, and the lack of congressional action on the issue of student debt, has led to a 42 percent increase in college student signups, according to SeekingArrangement CEO Brandon Wade.
Last July, the Rutgers’ board of governors voted unanimously to hike undergraduate tuition and fees 2.3 percent on the state university’s New Brunswick campus. Students attending the main campus in New Brunswick and Piscataway who live in New Jersey are paying $13,813 in tuition and fees for the 2014-2015 school year.
Calls for comment to the university were not immediately returned.
“While other countries seek to create opportunity and provide a better start for students by abolishing tuition fees or lowering them to reasonable amounts, Congress continues to ignore the problem,” Wade said. “The average debt is more than what most of these new graduates make in a year.”
The sheer amount of loan debt being carried by students may help explain why some students in the Garden State are turning to alternative funding methods to offset the cost of a higher education, says Barbara O’Neill, a Rutgers professor of financial resource management.
“People are anxious,” she says. “It’s like a sword hanging over them. If young adults don’t have the wherewithal to make payments on debt, it’s going to affect all of their decisions moving forward.”
New Jersey ranks in the top-10 in terms of highest amount of loan debt owed by higher education students. Higher education students who graduated from New Jersey institutions in 2013 owe an average of $28,109 in loan repayments, according to a study by the Project on Student Debt.
And many of those students are going into default. Recent studies by the U.S. Department of Education analyze the default rate of students in a three-year student cohort per each fiscal year. Of the 82,185 New Jersey students who had in fiscal year 2011 received a federal student loan, 8,741 defaulted within two years of the start of their repayment period.
That puts the the default rate for students attending four-year colleges in New Jersey at 10.6 percent, according to the most recently released numbers.
The national student loan default rate stands at 13.7 percent.
I would love to hear anyone’s thoughts about this growing trend.
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Sad state of affair. For a nation to be strong education should be ubiquitous and affordable.
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I notice the US isn’t starting to look at the ‘get your ass out to work instead of going to Uni’ option that’s slowly gaining popularity in the UK. University education getting you noticed is a myth if everyone is doing it. But I digress….
There are always a whole bunch of people who don’t want to lift a finger for a living and just want easy street. That’s okay until easy street finds its fun elsewhere and those people end up waitressing for a living.
Strangely, I’ve just followed a sugar daddy blog out of curiosity. And I’ve come to the conclusion that the only way I’m ever not going to retire in poverty is to find one. Me being slightly older than these ‘uni babes’ however, means he’s going to have to be way older than me, we’re talking Anna Nicole Smith territory plus a few years.
Each to their own I suppose whilst there’s supply and demand. I hope they start blogs. I need some new entertainment fodder on my feed. 😛
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Thank you for your comment. I am friends with a woman who is 40 and has a sugar daddy who is in his 60’s and pays her $2000 a month cash to be his sugarbaby. That’s $24k of tax free income a year!
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Damn, works for me. Do you know any of these in the UK. 😀
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Check out seekingarrangemnets.com
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Thanks. I joined out of curiosity. Wow, some of these guys are young. 😀
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It’s also really popular at Temple University
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My profile for the website was approved overnight. This morning I already have 3 messages. This could be an interesting social experiment for my blog. 😀
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I love it! I’m sure it will be!
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Most of them are younger than me which is amusing.
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Out of interest, what are the student loan repayment terms in the US?
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I’m not really sure but most of these kids are over $50k I’m debt when they start their work lives after college. Truly a tragedy.
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Here it’s about £9000 a year for tuition fees, I don’t know about maintenance grants. But students don’t have to pay it back until they reach earnings of £21000 then pay 8% (as far as I’m aware) so there’s quite a default period as some will never realise those earnings for years if ever.
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Yep. There’s a whole generation of people who just want to get things the easy way. We’re so used to click and it arrives with things like online shopping and the attitude has started to pervade everything. That said, the whole sugar daddy thing isn’t new.
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You make a great point there. I agree.
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It all comes back to what I do for business. My industry is very ‘I want it and I want it now’ and we are all so used to everything being on demand that we get used to it as a default position. Everyone wants to be famous. They think if they open up a Youtube channel or an Instagram account they’ll be overnight successes. There is no such thing as an overnight success ever. The girls joining this site aren’t doing it solely to pay off bills which everyone else would spend years working 2nd or 3rd jobs to pay off, they think that if they snap their fingers they’ll get a guy and won’t have to lift a finger for it except look pretty and spend his money. It seems kind of thoughtless that the website should pray on these graduates. Relationships of this kind are not easy to manage. I’ve noticed a lot of guys on there are married, a lot of them are 50s+, a lot of them want a lot of time for their bucks. It reminds me of WAGS. It’s a bit worrying that people see this as a solution at such a young age.
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We sell horses to Rutgers for their dressage program and I know it is horribly expensive. As for the sugar daddy idea, no. I went to college full time and worked a full time job. I paid off my one student loan on time and left with my self respect intact.
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Well done!
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