Nearly a quarter of parents surveyed across the country said they cannot afford to help pay for their child's college education, according to Discover Student Loans.
But with U.S. student debt topping $1 trillion, according to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, sometimes when daddy and momma can't help with the college bills any longer students are inclined to turn to a different sort of parental figure.
New data from dating website SeekingArrangement.com, which pairs successful sugar daddies and mommas with more than 1 million cash-strapped student sugar babies, reveal students are increasingly looking to sugar daddies for help. The number of student sugar babies has increased more than twelvefold since 2009.
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As it turns out, nursing students lead their collegiate counterparts in hooking up with a sugar daddy or momma to seek a relationship, mentorship and an average of $3,000 in allowances. Business majors, who might look at relationships as transactions, took second place, followed closely by psychology majors. (Tweet This)
Sugar babies were decidedly unimpressed with the discipline of philosophy, which was the least represented major.
Of the nearly 4 million active sugar babies the site has, nearly half are college students. And much like nurses, not all student sugar babies are female. About 15 percent of the college student sugar babies are male.
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Yet both male and female students appear to be reaping the benefits of their "upfront" relationships. SeekingArrangment said that 67 percent of sugar babies that graduated in 2013 claimed they would be doing so debt-free with the help of their sugar daddies and mommas.
The National Student Nurses Association did not immediately respond to a request for comment.