If you’re a university student drowning in debt, conventional wisdom suggests you get a job waiting tables, pouring lattes, or standing at a busy intersection with a clipboard, asking strangers to donate to charity.

But there’s another way to pay your tuition, less known but infinitely more effective: the Sugar Baby way.

Using matchmaking websites like Seeking Arrangement, a growing number of university students — most of them young women in a bind — have been signing up online as official “Sugar Babies,” offering to enter into romantic and/or sexual relationships with wealthy, older males — a.k.a., Sugar Daddies — who provide them with gifts (handbags, jewelry etc.), and cash allowances. (Though most Sugar Babies are women, there are some men who sign up as Sugar Babies in search of Sugar Mamas).

This may sound like high-class prostitution, but in reality it’s more like advanced gold digging. Seeking Arrangement, for example, is set up like a dating service; Sugar Daddies don’t select Sugar Babies and don’t expect sex for a set price.

Babies and Daddies choose each other and discuss sex and financial compensation when and if it suits them (Hint: it usually does).

Like prostitution, this isn’t even remotely a new phenomenon. Media around the world, (including the Star) have covered Sugar Babies for years. What is brand new, though, is its exploding popularity on Canadian campuses.

According to Seeking Arrangement’s annual ranking, released this month, “Sugar Baby sign-ups” among university students in Canada have increased by 21 per cent over the last year. The trend is particularly pronounced at the University of Toronto (where the site saw 133 new Sugar Baby recruits), the University of Guelph (122 ), and McGill University in Montreal (110).

Mackson McDowall, a 60-year-old former lawyer who lives in Niagara Falls (he practised immigration law in the United States and was disbarred in the mid-2000s for commingling funds) has contributed financially to Sugar Babies at York University (his alma mater) and Princeton University in the United States. In an interview, he said he attributes the increased student presence on the site to a heightened appetite among young people for “fun and excitement.”

“If you had a choice between a Shakespeare play in Stratford, Ontario, or a Shakespeare play in London England, which would you choose?” he asks. Sugar Daddies, McDowall argues, can afford to take their Sugar Babies somewhere exotic, whereas university aged guys probably can’t.

“Maybe they can take them to Buffalo for chicken wings.”

Seeking Arrangement, McDowall said, “expands horizons.” Chicken wings, one presumes, don’t.

But broadening horizons may be less important to Sugar Babies than avoiding insolvency. The average student debt in this country is roughly $25,000, tuition is rising sharply (3.2 per cent last year), and textbooks still cost a fortune.

All of which makes the lust-for-fancy-dinners-and-luxury-vacations theory a bit sketchy.

Consider Rebecca (who chose to be identified by first name only in fear of rejection by her religious family), a 22-year-old University of Toronto student.

Rebecca says she would never have considered logging onto the website if it weren’t for her dire financial situation. “I was struggling so much, in debt.”

Rebecca has been a Sugar Baby on Seeking Arrangement for about a year, in which time her Sugar Daddy (a software executive who has since moved away), with whom she was involved sexually, gave her a weekly allowance of $600 and a gift of $1,500 tuition toward her summer courses. Other perks included handbags from Michael Kors and Louis Vuitton.

“I don’t regret it at all,” she says now. “I met someone I really liked.”

Then there’s Mila, (not her real name), a 20-year-old Sugar Baby and English major at the University of Toronto who chose to remain anonymous to avoid scorn and who turned to Sugar-Babying for equally non-frivolous reasons.

“I had been working part-time making little more than minimum wage, which wasn’t even scratching the surface of my school fees,” she said.

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“I wanted something more substantial to work with, so I wouldn’t have a mountain of debt after I graduated.” Today Mila is in a relationship with a married, 54-year-old Sugar Daddy who gives her a monthly allowance that she uses toward tuition, books, phone and credit card bills.

If you’re thinking that there’s something undeniably sleazy or at least depressing about a romantic arrangement that’s based on the bartering of sex for tuition, you’re not alone.

But if you can get beyond knee-jerk distaste, it becomes difficult to judge too harshly a group of financially desperate yet enterprising women (and even some men) who have managed to negotiate their company and, yes, bodies, in a transaction that’s at least as lucrative as conventional escorting — but in their view not nearly as soul-crushing.

Sure, pulling double shifts at Starbucks might be the more respectable option, but when you’re facing gargantuan debt and bankruptcy, respectability can run a distant second to peace of mind.

This isn’t a permanent vocation, but a necessary phase. We may consider it sad that hundreds of Canadian students have turned to sugar-babying; but in the world we inhabit, it is also uniquely practical.