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College students seeking to pay their bills may be tempted by egg donor agency advertisements with five-figure compensation values.

Egg donor agencies and donor banks seeking young women commonly place daily advertisements in college newspapers, such as the Daily Bruin.

“We like the donors to be young because we get the best response with younger donors,” said William Freije, professor in the department of obstetrics and gynecology at the UCLA David Geffen School of Medicine.

After people choose a donor from an agency, the agency explains the process of donation and the risks involved in donating the eggs, said Mary Lathus, who donated eggs 12 years ago and is director of Conceptual Options, an egg donation and surrogacy center .

The donor is then given a thorough physical exam and genetic family history analysis as well as a psychological evaluation.

When it is clear that the woman understands that she is donating her eggs and will not want to seek out the child, and when satisfactory results have been obtained from the genetic history, the process of egg retrieval begins.

A variety of hormones are given to the donor to stimulate egg growth. Once the ovarian follicles are mature, ovulation is triggered and the eggs are collected with a needle under general anesthesia.

“The ovaries get stimulated and as far as we can tell there is no long-term problem in doing that, but the donors are given these medicines which are very powerful,” Freije said.

But there are some risks involved when the eggs are retrieved.

“Any time you put a needle in a structure you risk infection and bleeding. If someone were to bleed a lot, a transfusion of blood would be necessary,” Freije said. “There is also the risk associated with the general anesthesia.”

Fewer than one in 1,000 women will need major surgery due to complications during the egg retrieval process, according to the American Society for Reproductive Medicine Web site.

Generally the donor agencies and recipients seek two types of women for this process.

“The first group they are looking for are younger college-age women who maybe need a little help with their tuition ... and the second group is young mothers,” said Rene Almeling, a graduate sociology student who has been researching the topic for four years.

Advertisements specify a couples’ requests in categories such as education, height, physical appearance and medical background. While one advertisement wants the donor to have scored a 1400 or higher on the SAT, another advertisement specifies that the egg donor have modeling experience.

“They are really interested in women who have a high level of education ... and they want the women to be attractive,” Almeling said.

Lathus said donors give a variety of reasons for wanting to donate their eggs and generally their purpose is to assist an infertile couple conceive as well as to earn extra money.

“I didn’t connect the risk to the compensation,” Lathus said of the decision to donate her own eggs. “This didn’t require a lot of time and effort and I thought it was amazing.”

Lathus said girls may be looking through the classifieds for a part-time job. “She might say, ‘Here is something I can do, maybe I don’t have to work this semester and just go to school,’ but then the outlook is also very altruistic to help,” Lathus said.

There are currently 2.1 million couples with infertility issues in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control Web site.

The monetary compensation for egg donors is generally between $5,000 and $10,000.

This value is larger when certain ethnicities are sought where the donor pool is small. Some people will offer tens of thousands of dollars for a near-perfect donor.

In comparison, sperm donors are given $75 per sample. While men have an unlimited supply of sperm, women are born with a finite number of eggs which they lose through menstruation every month, and the quality of the eggs decrease over time. In addition, women are placed on medication to surgically retrieve the eggs and men are not.

“While it is more physically invasive for a woman (as a donor), it does require a lot of time and energy on part of the sperm donor. ... The egg donors are paid no matter how many eggs they produce and whether they produce any eggs at all,” Almeling said.

The compensation has increased in value over the past decade.

“My sister and I were donors in college and we were compensated $1,000 and that was a lot. The norm was $500, and we’re talking about 12 years ago,” Lathus said.

Once the women apply to be egg donors and are placed on the agency’s Web site, it can takes months to be selected by a couple.

“I feel it is her body and I will counsel and advise her but it has to be her decision,” Lathus said.