Admittedly, I originally thought The Atlantic was referencing the disrespected candy.

Sugar Babies are an American confection of chococlate-covered caramel balls. Mainly it's a candy for people with low expectations in life.

So consider me confused when The Atlantic posted an article regarding the new wave of sugar babies coming to American colleges, which turns out not be candy-related at all. Or not the candy you're thinking of. Mainly these sugar babies have very high expectations in life.

The sugar babies The Atlantic refers to are college students, usually female, who look for sugar daddies, usually old men (and also a candy!), who will--ahem--find mutual assistance from one another. Using mainly statistics from the website SeekingArrangement, The Atlantic tries to connect rising college tuition rates and student debt to the spike in old fashioned May-December hookups.

The flaw with this titillating story is that the sexual correlation to student need is tenuous at best. The Atlantic points out that public school students make up the slight majority of those enrolled at SeekingArrangement--yet a private institution, New York University, has the most "sugar babies" for one college. And while The Atlantic tries to defend New York City's cost-of-living as the reasoning, that doesn't quite justify why a city like Atlanta, a relatively cheap place to live, has the highest density of "sugar daddies."

So what does all of this mean?

Humans like sex and money and references to a family of pretty basic candy. Fairly simple.

In the end, let us not forget about sugar mamas. No, I mean Sugar Mama--the candy--related to Sugar Babies and Sugar Daddy. The manufacturer hasn't made Sugar Mama since the 1980s, but I think we all know that sugar mamas in all forms have been less popularized in pop culture.