Brian Krylowicz, director of Springfield College’s counseling center, calls the Massachusetts institution a “sweatpants campus.” He’s referring to Springfield’s sporty culture, buttressed by its reputation as the “birthplace of basketball” and by a student body that is 30 percent Division III athletes.
“Our walls don’t have ivy,” he says. “Our walls have a basketball hoop.”
But in 2023, when mobile and in-person sports betting became legal in Massachusetts, Krylowicz could foresee how a passion for sports could have a dark side. That students could now legally wager large sums of money on their phones, outside of public view, alarmed him.
He started meeting with student groups and asking about their relationships with sports betting. Many students said they didn’t bet often enough for it to be a problem. But Krylowicz remains concerned.
In 2018, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a federal law that banned sports betting in most states. Seeing a new source of tax revenue, dozens of states moved to legalize sports gambling. Thirty-eight states and Washington, D.C., now allow consumers to place bets on sports, either in person, online, or both.
The booming industry has put colleges in a bind. On the one hand, advertising deals with sportsbooks can put millions of dollars in colleges’ coffers, providing a boost to their athletics departments. On the other hand, cozying up to the gambling industry could come across as an endorsement of an addictive behavior — one that experts say is increasingly taking hold among college students.
As the annual ritual of March Madness — and along with it, a likely surge in gambling — nears, here’s what colleges should know about sports betting.
We don’t really know how widespread sports betting, or sports-betting addiction, is on college campuses.
The research that does exist suggests sports betting is common.
A 2023 survey by the National Collegiate Athletic Association asked 3,527 18- to 22-year-olds about their sports-betting habits. Fifty-eight percent said they had wagered on sports before, and 4 percent of that pool said they bet daily. The most common way respondents said they bet on sports was by using a mobile app or website.
The survey found that participants pursuing higher education were slightly more likely to wager on sports than those not in college, community college, or graduate school.
A lot of underage kids are going to be gambling.
There’s no doubt that sports-betting ads are reaching students, experts say.
“The kids are being bombarded with these ads,” says Lia Nower, director of the Center for Gambling Studies at Rutgers University. “This generation of young people [is] being raised with betting and sports just inextricably linked.”
Currently, self-reported rates of problem gambling are fairly low among the college-going population. In the American College Health Association’s spring 2023 National College Health Assessment, which surveyed 55,292 undergraduate students, only 0.2 percent reported having ever been diagnosed with a gambling disorder.
But the shame associated with a gambling addiction may preclude many students from admitting they need help, says Jim Lange, director of Ohio State University’s Higher Education Center for Alcohol and Drug Misuse Prevention and Recovery.
“So campuses don’t see a student with a problem,” Lange says. “The problem is too private — just between them and their phone — and too stigmatized [for students] to admit that they’ve made that sort of mistake in their gambling that they’re now in serious trouble.”
The Higher Education Center is developing an open-access tool that colleges will be able to use to assess gambling behavior on their campuses and compare it to others, Lange says.
Colleges are navigating tricky relationships with the sports-betting industry.
Some institutions have signed multimillion-dollar deals that allow sports-betting companies to advertise on their campuses. According to The New York Times, such contracts have helped athletics departments recover losses from the pandemic.
But the partnerships have problems. For one, colleges are not able to prevent students who are under 21 from seeing ads, despite the fact that most states prohibit those under 21 from gambling.
Profitable Wager
As the state becomes the latest to legalize online gambling, it’s earmarking a chunk of the profits for athletic departments. “I’m excited, no matter how much it is,” one administrator said.
“What message are they sending if they’re taking all this money from gambling companies’ sponsorships and promoting gambling?” Nower, at Rutgers, says. “Because a lot of underage kids are going to be gambling.”
A few colleges are already reconsidering their plans. Michigan State and Louisiana State Universities and the Universities of Maryland at College Park and of Colorado at Boulder all signed deals with sports-betting companies during the wave of legalization. They all ended their partnerships in 2023, as college gambling came under greater scrutiny.
Most colleges have not updated their policies to reflect the new betting landscape, according to a 2023 survey by the Shirley Povich Center for Sports Journalism and the Howard Center for Investigative Journalism, both at Maryland.
The centers could only verify that 23 percent of 145 Division I institutions surveyed had betting policies on the books, such as banning wagering on the institution’s own teams and prohibiting on-campus gambling, among other things.
For college athletes, sports betting introduces new pressures.
NCAA policy doesn’t allow college athletes to bet on sports, but there’s evidence that it happens. A survey of more than 22,000 athletes across the three NCAA divisions in 2016 — long before the recent wave of sports-betting legalization — found that 24 percent of male athletes and 5 percent of female athletes had wagered on sports in the past year.
The NCAA expects to publish the results of a new survey on college athletes’ wagering habits this fall, a spokeswoman for the association told The Chronicle in an email.
You could be seeing someone eating lunch, and they’re looking on their phone, and they could be losing $100 at that moment or more.
Krylowicz, of Springfield College, says he is worried about college athletes engaging in point-shaving, a type of match-fixing where a bribed player (or players) colludes with a gambler to try to limit the score of a game. It is most common in college basketball.
On the flip side, college athletes might feel even more pressure from their peers to perform well, says M. Dolores Cimini, director of the Center for Behavioral Health Promotion and Applied Research at the State University of New York at Albany.
“A fellow student can say, ‘Well, I really bet on you to take this team to the winning end of things,’” Cimini says. “And then if they don’t, it creates mental-health-type stress on the student athlete.”
The Center for Gambling Studies at Rutgers is developing a program to help college athletics departments identify athletes with gambling problems and connect them with treatment.
A gambling addiction may be less visible than an alcohol or drug problem, but it can have similar consequences.
Whereas impairment from alcohol and drugs causes “community issues,” sports-betting addiction is not as easily seen, Lange says.
“You could be seeing someone eating lunch, and they’re looking on their phone, and they could be losing $100 at that moment or more,” he says.
A gambling addiction can lead to severe debt, strained relationships, mental-health troubles, and poor academic performance. Research has documented the comorbidity of gambling addiction and substance abuse.
Gambling addiction can also lead students to make poor decisions with their financial aid.
Krylowicz says students may try to stretch their refund check by gambling instead of using it to pay for rent and other necessities. When it doesn’t work, they’re in trouble.
The University at Albany last year received a five-year, $4.8-million grant from the federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration to develop screening, brief intervention, and referral to treatment tools for students with substance-use or gambling problems. As part of that program, the university has added questions about gambling behavior to its well-being screenings.
The best practices for supporting students with substance-use issues carry over to gambling addiction. But there’s still stigma.
The techniques that help people recover from alcohol and drug abuse — like cognitive behavioral therapy and recovery communities — can also be effective at combating gambling addiction.
Lange says he has heard from colleagues that people overcoming gambling addiction sometimes do not feel welcome in recovery groups.
“I have heard it in the college space as well from even professionals that have not accepted the concept that this is the same model as a substance-use disorder,” Lange says.
Gambling disorder was considered an “impulse-control disorder” until a 2013 update to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, which defines and categorizes hundreds of mental-health diagnoses. Now, it’s part of the “substance-related and addictive disorders” section of the manual.
“I think that people with substance-use disorders don’t necessarily view people with gambling disorders as needing as much help, as really out of control,” Nower says, “because it’s hard to believe that you can induce the same changes in craving in the brain with a behavior as with a drug.”
Support Resources: The National Problem Gambling Helpline, run by the National Council on Problem Gambling, can be reached by calling 1-800-GAMBLER or texting 800GAM. The helpline is confidential and available 24 hours a day and seven days a week.
