Sports Betting: The Silent Crisis on Campus

During the previous fall semester, a graduate student in one of my seminars confided to me that he’d lost nearly $10,000 in loans on a prop bet on a single first inning of the Blue Jays vs. Dodgers World Series Game 4. He admitted it the day after he was unable to submit a midterm research paper. What had started as a “fun way to watch the game” had morphed into missed deadlines, strained relationships, and a level of anxiety he no longer knew how to hide.

This graduate student is not alone. Over the course of the past three semesters, I have observed a marked increase in students’ transitioning from casual to compulsive betting habits. Many of them are accumulating debt they can’t pay off, while some have dropped out of school entirely to earn money to cover their losses on their mobile devices. Until recently, this behavior was limited to casinos and illegal bookies; now it is in the palm of everyone’s hands, designed for quick, easy, and nearly endless access. As this behavior is being legalized throughout the U.S., higher education institutions can no longer view sports betting as a private vice; it has become an issue of public health and academic integrity, and it is the only institution that is positioned to intervene before the problem becomes too large to solve.

A Market That Exploded Overnight

After the Supreme Court ruled against the federal prohibition regarding professional and amateur sports betting, Murphy v. NCAA (2018), the worldwide gambling industry expanded more quickly than any of the regulators could have imagined. The American Gaming Association lists 40 states where sports betting is now legal in some fashion. The American public placed nearly $150 billion in legal sports wagers in 2024 alone, with that number continuing to increase every year since the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act of 1992 (PASPA) was repealed.

The positive economic benefits of sports gambling legalization (the generation of taxes, job creation, and movement from illegal to legal gambling markets) do exist. The collateral damage created by legalized gambling is becoming identifiable and quantifiable. According to the National Council on Problem Gambling, around 2.5 million adult Americans will meet the diagnostic criteria for a severe gambling disorder each year, with an additional 5-8 million adult Americans who will experience at least mild to moderate gambling problems. Additionally, since 2018, there has been an increase of greater than 150% in calls to the national gambling helpline, and researchers at Johns Hopkins describe online sports wagering as a growing public health crisis.

Why the Modern Product Is Different

The applications themselves are the narrative. As said in a recent article by Scientific American, platforms like DraftKings, FanDuel, and BetMGM all use the same design strategies and behavioral terms of engagement that are utilized in slot machines to encourage repetitive play; these include variable reward schedules, highly personalized messages and notifications being sent to users in real-time, one-click deposits, “risk-free” bonuses that require users to fulfill a wagering requirement to collect their bonus funds, and very small live micro-bets that can be made during an inning of a baseball game (or any sporting event), allowing a user to make tens of bets in just a fraction of the time it takes to complete an inning.

The Responsible Gaming Council has researched and documented how this design use takes advantage of the brain’s dopamine pathways (such as using the developing prefrontal cortex), particularly regarding younger people who have not yet developed solid impulse control. Adding this type of architecture to the new age sports broadcast (with win probability and live odds being consistently present) makes it very difficult to determine when gambling ends and watching an event begins. Thus, for a generation accustomed to instant gratification, there is little to no delay between watching an event and placing a wager.

College Students Sit at the Center of the Bullseye

The demographic overlap is not accidental. The NCAA 2023 Sports Wagering Study shows that 58% of college students aged 18-22 have participated in some form of sports gambling, as high as 67% for students living on campus, and 63% of those who reside on campus reported that they recall seeing sports betting advertisements, and 58% stated those advertisements caused them to place bets at a higher frequency than they would have. Research conducted by Dr. Stephen Shapiro shows that there exists an identifiable subset of college-aged males (young, educated people who are outgoing and who average 22.4 hours of viewing sporting events each week) whose self-esteem is largely based upon their appearance, but who are also very much gambling to increase their self-worth.

The impact of gambling addiction can also be seen in the same demographic as the population of college students (The Ohio State University College of Social Work), with as many as 10% of students meeting the definition of pathological gambling, which is approximately twice the level in the rest of the general adult population. As TIME Magazine shows, the negative impact of gambling on college students is reflected in the increases in college student debt, secret second jobs, and dropping out of college due to having unpaid credit card balances.

The Clinical and Human Toll

The evidence for the clinically identifiable phenomena associated with gambling disorders is clear. According to Dr. Mark Griffiths and associates in the journal Frontiers in Psychiatry, the “chasing losses” phenomenon of behavior to recoup losses through further gambling is the official indicator of a gambling disorder, as indicated by approximately 80% of people with a gambling problem. This behavior will cause a bad day to turn into a semester’s worth of failure.

The alarming statistics for co-occurring problems with dependent gambling behavior are even more dire. A widely cited longitudinal study published in PubMed Central shows that youth with gambling problems are far more likely to become dependent on both alcohol and illegal drugs and that the young onset of a gambling problem will predict more serious psychological outcomes in adulthood. A meta-analysis reported in PMC indicated that persons with gambling problems are at risk of attempting suicide 5 to 10 times more than the general population, even when controlling for factors such as depression and the burden of debt.

In its coverage of the growth of sports gambling, CBS News clearly describes a public health emergency that has arrived faster than measures to prevent its consequences have been implemented. For a student subject to the competing tensions of academic pressure, a low income, and the previously determined mental health status of a pandemic cohort, gambling addiction is not a side issue; it is an accelerant.

Why Prohibition Won’t Work — and Why the University Must Step In

Campuses can prohibit wagering on their WiFi connections. If a campus bans wagering, it may be “naked” due to the availability of cellular service. Although universities may send harsh emails, they have no effect because students receive push notifications from betting apps every 3 minutes. Ultimately, the NCAA’s data indicate that NCAA students bet at relatively similar rates regardless of whether they live in a state that allows wagering.

The failure of prohibition demonstrates that an educational approach has not yet been attempted with students who gamble, and continues to have preliminary data that supports educational intervention. The latest evidence will be due in January 2025, when the NCAA will distribute its research findings, which evaluated the effect of strategically defined educational opportunities on the gambling behavior of NCAA student-athletes.

Some institutions have developed programs such as the Tigers Play Responsibly program, designed by Towson University, which provides peer leaders with the ability to identify at-risk students, who can then be connected to same-day counseling. Other institutions, such as Ohio State, have created curricula intended to enhance their existing wellness resources with gambling prevention resources. Finally, the American Gaming Association’s established Responsible Gambling Principles provide a basis for institutional partners as to what they will support to create effective gambling prevention programmatic efforts.

An effective curriculum for a university should consist of at least three components. First, it should provide students with an honest education regarding gambling operations, such as an understanding of how odds are determined, how much profit a person is expected to lose if they gamble, and why a “risk-free” way of gambling is an advertising promotion and not an accurate way to represent gambling mathematically.

Second, it should provide students with clinical signs of problem gambling, such as chasing losses, preoccupying oneself with the act of gambling, borrowing money for gambling, and creating false excuses. By providing this education, students will be able to identify problem gambling behaviors in themselves as well as in their peers. Third, it should provide peer-support pathways and access to counseling services that are as prominent in sports stadiums as any other type of advertisement promoting sports.

Reframing Gambling as a Question of Data Literacy

Universities have an opportunity to have a big impact with their intellectual ability. If all you think of gambling as is a moral hazard, then you’ll allow this industry to frame the discussion. If instead you think of gambling as a question of statistical analysis, you’ll be able to reframe the discussion in your terms.

A student who has taken a well-constructed class, such as sport analytics classes being developed at Syracuse University, will learn how to apply analytical thought to react to biased gut reactions. Once students learn how to use a computer to calculate an expected value, model winning probabilities using logistic regression, and apply Bayesian updates to betting markets during games, the “hustle” becomes clear when viewed via an analysis method they’ve created themselves; students will see in their own personal spreadsheets how a house edge that is always between 4% and 6% will eventually cause problems for even the best of bettors.

Students will learn how to quantify variance, how to size their bets, and know the difference between an edge and plain old dumb luck.

These things will most certainly provide students with helpful skills. Bayesian inference, learning how to write and execute Python and SQL, and building statistical models are all in-demand skill sets that finance, insurance, biotech, and technology companies are currently hiring. When students complete a responsible-gambling curriculum using analytic methods, they will prepare themselves for both coming in and furthering their careers in these analytical positions, expected to be among those with the greatest job growth after graduation.

The Case for Acting Now

There’s no more denying it; legal sports wagering is here to stay. The amount of tax dollars generated from this growing trend, the number of politicians who have invested not just their time but also their political capital into long-term relationships with the various aspects of the industry, and finally, how ingrained this type of recreational entertainment has become in our lives as a generation (i.e., social media) leads us to the conclusion that our students, whether or not they participate in gaming, will have exposure to this type of business.

Higher education, throughout its history, has stepped into similar types of breaches. The interventions that occurred for those breaches were initiated the same way as this need for intervention to reduce student exposure to gaming-related violence—by institutional recognition that the damage caused by those breaches was substantial to our students and future leaders; that the space occupied by those students and future leaders belongs to us; and that we have a duty to provide them with information that will protect them from long-term, negative effects resulting from personal choices made while in an environment where gambling is legal.

Suppose my student had taken a semester-long course, before the World Series, on how to create sportsbooks, what a prop bet’s expected value would be, and how brains respond to near misses. He could have still watched Game 4 and could have even made a small bet; however, I don’t think he would have placed a $10,000 bet on the first inning of Game 4.

The difference the curriculum makes is not in terms of morality or fear. It is in the teaching of probability, design of the product, and self-awareness through one institution that students still place their faith in to teach them how to survive in a world that exists as it does. Sports betting is now an everyday part of our world; therefore, institutions of higher education need to begin providing education about sports betting.