Paying for college is rough. That’s not a surprise, and because it can be so expensive, people have to turn to less-than-favorable means of earning money to get through it. Madison even boasts its very own plasma center, where donations are compensated in cash.
This is all fine and good—unless, like me, you’re terrified of needles—but recent reports have revealed some very strange sources of income that are just plain icky.
College students are being targeted for egg donations, according to a report by KOBTV4. The concept of oocyte donations isn’t so shocking. It’s even comforting when considering the various diseases or circumstances that might prevent a conventional pregnancy.
However, the idea of companies seeking out young people who are totally dependent on that money sounds less than ethical, particularly when gametes are the only part of one’s body that can legally be sold.
Despite the unsavory aspects of giving up some potential offspring, women can make bank from such donations. Asian women can make up to $20,000 for their eggs, though the price is lower for females of other races, the Los Angeles Times reports. So the financially challenged college girl might say donating some eggs is worth it, if it keeps the loan collectors at bay.
So donating eggs is generally acceptable. Maybe a little disconcerting, but it results in something positive.
But nothing can justify the creation of the unsettling website, seekingarrangement.com. This is essentially a dating site in which one party is super wealthy and the other, well, not so much, bringing together “sugar daddies” and their “sugar babies” under one happy little URL.
I feel it’s important to remind everyone we live in America. People are free to live whatever lifestyle they choose, and I’m not judging if your man just so happens to be loaded.
But 350,000 sugar babies on the site are college kids, two-thirds of whom admit their sugar daddies are paying most of their tuition. So this brings up the ugly question: are these sugar babies really looking for love, or are they just trying to get by?
I was immediately turned off after a quick glance at the homepage. It describes the different kinds of sugar babies, one of which is the “Sugar Lover”—someone who “likes to have intelligible conversation with a man who not only can afford to buy her nice things, but also knows how to please her in the bedroom.” Yuck.
The site also caters to the “Aspiring Trophy Wife”—I didn’t know this was an actual career goal…?—which is a woman who “only date[s] wealthy” men.
More applicably, seekingarrangement.com services the “Goal Digger.” The Goal Digger is marketed as a sugar baby using their sugar daddy as a means to an end, like a college degree. The description ends with a warning: “It’s not uncommon for a Sugar Daddy to employ a Sugar Baby somewhere down the line, sometimes it really is about WHO you know.”
Statistics make this sound like a popular route for the struggling student, but overall it’s just a little gross. The “typical” Goal Digger is essentially encouraged to sleep their way into a job, while other users are pretty much told to let high class men earn money and do their work for them.
Brandon Wade, the owner of the site, told Daily Mail rising tuition and fees were good for business.
“We’ve had a huge influx of beautiful, highly educated young women,” he said. The phenomenon has traveled to the UK, where 35 percent of the site’s British users are students.
Ladies, let’s not take a step backward. Women are fully capable of getting a job, saving money and working their way up to wealth. College is tough, but almost everyone has loans, and no one should be sleeping with guys they met on the Internet in order to get a degree.
Kate is a sophomore majoring in Spanish and English. Please send all feedback to opinion@dailycardinal.com.
