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What started as a hobby is a hobby no longer. Chase estimates that he spends two hours a day placing bets — that is, if he has money to place — and 12 hours a day with gambling in the background, when he watches streamers discuss their wagers or chats with other gamblers on the app Discord, often while in class or while studying. On his computer screen, his academic work takes up the right half. His gambling stream takes up the left.
Chase knows he has “a major problem.” Though sometimes he wins, more often he loses, and he worries about how much of his money he’ll be willing to fork over when he’s earning a doctor’s salary. Already, he’s stretching his limits. He says he forced himself to get a part-time job to make enough money to get by, which is something he wouldn’t have to do if he “just could have a little more self-control.” When his financial aid hits his bank account, part of it goes toward his living expenses. Whatever remains, he sinks into sports betting.
“I prepay everything so that I can’t lose it all later on,” Chase says, “because I know I will.”
Many young people, particularly young men like Chase, have flocked to sports betting in recent years. More than 30 states legalized the practice in some form after the U.S. Supreme Court in 2018 overturned a federal ban that applied to most states. Since then, ads for online sportsbooks, or platforms on which people can bet on sports, have exploded, along with the range of betting options. Using the phones in their pockets, consumers in states where such betting is legal can place bets on a mind-bogglingly long menu of distinct events — the number of home runs in a game, which NASCAR driver will complete the fastest lap, the color of Gatorade dumped on the winning coach at the Super Bowl. And they can do so immediately, often while a game is being played.
I prepay everything so that I can’t lose it all later on, because I know I will.
This potent brew of around-the-clock access and aggressive promotion is cause for alarm, experts testified at a December hearing on sports gambling before a U.S. Senate committee. “We are presently witnessing the early years of a fast-building public-health crisis,” Harry Levant, director of gambling policy at the Public Health Advocacy Institute at Northeastern University’s law school, told senators. In an interview with The Chronicle, Levant, who is also a counselor for those struggling with gambling addiction and an addict in recovery himself, emphasized how common sports betting is among Gen Z. “Every one of my college-student patients tells me, ‘All my friends are doing it, all the time,’” he says.
Colleges are at the epicenter of a major cultural shift. They’ve been slow to see it. But that’s starting to change, according to gambling and addiction scholars and student-affairs administrators who spoke to The Chronicle. Though problem gambling is not as widely recognized as other behaviors that can harm students’ well-being, some institutions are taking steps to address it on their campus, through approaches like screenings and outreach campaigns.
Still, some experts are skeptical that enough people in higher ed grasp the scale of the problem, or know how to treat it. Levant says he often gets referrals from college counseling centers that are “ill-equipped to handle this. They don’t understand it,” he says. “They don’t know what’s going on.”
With apps like DraftKings and FanDuel offering bets on every sport from football to Formula 1, users can try to win margaritas for the table whenever, wherever. Online gambling “has been a game-changer, because it has introduced so many more people to gambling, and it facilitates gambling 24 hours a day,” says Lia Nower, who directs the Center for Gambling Studies at Rutgers University. Plus, many sports leagues, television networks, and media companies embraced sports betting after the 2018 Supreme Court ruling, embedding ads for apps and discussions of odds and spreads into broadcasts. (Higher ed also opened its arms to sports betting, briefly. A 2022 New York Times investigation found no fewer than eight universities had signed deals with online sports-betting companies and, in some cases, advertised the practice on campus to students. After public outcry, at least four of those universities ended their partnerships, The Chronicle previously reported.)
For young people today, Nower says, “gambling and sports are inextricably linked.” A 2023 survey of more than 3,500 18- to 22-year-olds commissioned by the National Collegiate Athletic Association found that sports betting is “pervasive” among that age group. Nearly 60 percent of those polled had participated in “at least one sports-betting activity.” Sixteen percent of respondents had “engaged in at least one risky behavior,” and 6 percent of bettors said they had lost $500 or more in a single day.
I have student-athlete patients who have lost scholarships. I have patients who stopped going to class. … Almost all of them are gambling student-loan money.
As legal sports betting boomed, so has the risk of gambling addiction, experts warn. At least some states that have legalized the practice have seen calls to gambling hotlines increase. Pennsylvania, for example, reportedly saw its volume more than double. Keith S. Whyte, then executive director of the National Council on Problem Gambling, said at the December Senate committee hearing that “it’s clear gambling problems have grown over the past six years, especially among young male online-sports bettors.” Research shows that men are approximately twice as likely as women to struggle with compulsive gambling, and young people in general are considered higher risk. According to Whyte, in America today, the more educated you are, the more likely you are to bet on sports.
This means young, college-aged and college-attending men — a demographic that higher ed already struggles to enroll and retain — are acutely vulnerable to developing sports-betting habits that can shift their priorities away from academics, strain their finances, isolate them from friends and family members, and provoke feelings of guilt, embarrassment, and worthlessness.
“I have a number of patients who ended up just flunking out of school, dropping out of school,” says Levant, the gambling counselor. “I have student-athlete patients who have lost scholarships. I have patients who stopped going to class. … Almost all of them are gambling student-loan money. I have patients who are then going back to family members and taking money from family members to try and fuel gambling.”
Though their circumstances differ, every patient he works with, Levant says, “is carrying just bucketfuls of shame.”
Though very few Sacred Heart students who visit the counseling center identify gambling as a concern, the center added two questions to its intake form anyway. The first asks if the respondent has participated in any gambling activities, including sports betting, in the past six months. The second asks if they have ever found it “difficult to stop gambling once starting and/or stick to any financial limits that you set.”
A “yes” on those questions opens the door to a conversation about that topic with a counselor, says Jeff LaBella, who is Sacred Heart’s counseling and collegiate recovery director. LaBella thinks screening is important for any college to generate a picture of what’s actually happening on campus. “If you asked us about anything else,” such as alcohol consumption, “we’d say, ‘We have pretty good data on that because we’re asking about it. We’ve been screening about it,’” LaBella says. “But this is just so new.” (While students rarely identify as having a problem with gambling, Geisler has heard from two or three parents who are concerned about their children. “I never had those calls five years ago,” he says.)
Other colleges are also turning to surveys to learn more about the scope and impact of their students’ sports betting. Lindsey Mortenson, executive director of university health and counseling at the University of Michigan, said the combination of sportsbooks’ “assertive marketing,” the rising tide of loneliness and social isolation among young people, and the fact that their brains are still developing their executive function and impulse control told her “the perfect storm was coming.”
We don’t necessarily say, ‘Oh, you have a problem with gambling.’
To brace for it, Mortenson and her team conducted what’s called a “convenience sample survey.” This past fall, more than 800 people — two-thirds of them students, the rest faculty and staff members — who checked into one of five clinics were handed a voluntary and confidential form that asked 16 questions about sports betting. Mortenson’s team added five custom questions that don’t appear on national screening tools, such as “Have you ever placed a bet while in class or at work?” and “Has your sports betting/gambling ever negatively impacted your ability to meet your basic needs (e.g., rent, food, utilities, health care, child care)?”
Of the 575 students who completed the survey, one in eight reported having friends, family members, or acquaintances with a sports-gambling problem, according to preliminary data from a paper under review, written by Mortenson. Men were more likely than women, and undergraduates were almost twice as likely as graduate students, to know someone with a problem. Almost 14 percent reported experiencing pressure to engage in sports betting from people in their lives. Men were more than three times as likely to report pressure as women. And students ages 18 to 24 were nearly twice as likely to experience pressure as their older peers.
Most responding students who placed bets did so just once or a few times annually, and the typical wager was $20 or less. However, of the 55 students who reported a history of sports gambling outside of one-off events like March Madness, a quarter of them “endorsed at least one risk behavior,” the paper says, such as chasing their losses or being mentally preoccupied by betting for a period of two weeks or longer.
The upside of a convenience sample survey is that it’s quick. The downside is that it’s not representative of the Michigan student body. “We can’t make generalizations about the prevalence of problem gambling” on campus based on the results, Mortenson says. Still, she says, that survey did inform their next steps, including plans for a bigger survey in the future.
A few experts who spoke to The Chronicle stressed that students who are losing sleep over failed parlays might not think that sports betting rises to the level of “gambling,” per se. So survey questions must speak to the behaviors as students understand them, says Jim Lange, executive director of Ohio State University’s Higher Education Center for Alcohol and Drug Misuse Prevention and Recovery. Just asking if someone has a gambling problem won’t accurately capture the scope of said problem, he says. Nower, the Rutgers scholar, says the word “gambling” carries such a stigma that many people will not self-identify with that behavior when asked.
Rutgers’ Center for Gambling Studies, which Nower directs, developed a screening protocol that asks questions about specific activities and their frequency. Individuals are asked to indicate how often they’ve, for example, “played daily fantasy sports” for money, “bet on esports,” or “spent real money on social sports-betting apps” within the past year. They’re also asked if, as a result, they’ve struggled financially to the degree that they sought help with living expenses, if they’ve ever “become restless, irritable, or anxious” when they’ve tried to stop or cut down, and if they’ve tried to keep their friends or family from knowing how much money they’ve spent.
The University at Albany, too, avoids using the word “gambling” when screening students, according to M. Dolores Cimini, who directs the Center for Behavioral Health Promotion and Applied Research there. One strategy that the center has deployed, with the help of a $4.8-million federal grant, is using peer “prevention navigators.” These are mostly graduate students, but also some undergraduates, who are trained in screening procedures and show up in places where students “naturally congregate,” Cimini says, such as advising settings or in classrooms where the professor has given permission.
Students in those places can choose to answer survey questions about aspects of their well-being, including gambling. They can then meet with the navigators to discuss their scores. In those conversations, the navigators use “motivational interviewing,” Cimini says, which is supposed to be nonconfrontational and collaborative. “We don’t necessarily say, ‘Oh, you have a problem with gambling,’” she says. Rather, the navigator might point out that the student’s score in a given area is higher than the general student population and ask what they think. “If it’s sports betting, we ask them, ‘What are the good things that you experience about sports betting? What are the not-so-good things?’” Cimini says.
Then, they may discuss the upsides and downsides of changing their behavior, gauge the student’s readiness to make those changes, and form a specific plan. What most students need is that brief conversation, Cimini says. Those who need additional help are directed to resources such as the New York Council on Problem Gambling, which can help connect students to support groups and addiction-treatment providers.
“You want to increase dialogue about what even gambling is, before you can start talking about gambling prevention,” says Emily Wiegand, the university counseling center’s assistant director for prevention. Initially, she says, their programming, which began in the fall of 2022, was sparsely attended. But then mobile sports betting officially launched in Maryland that November, and “all of a sudden,” Wiegand says, “students were coming to our tables.”
Their outreach tapped into a population of students who do not gamble themselves but who are close with those who do. They did not expect “the number of sorority girls who were asking us questions about gambling because of their fraternity boyfriends,” Wiegand says. They realized there was a need for sorority-specific workshops that address how to have a conversation about this topic. “Like, what are the words you can use? What is the language that people can be receptive to?”
Like Cimini at Albany, Wiegand also recognized the power of peers. With the grant, they trained student leaders involved in Greek life, club sports, and athletics on the basics of gambling prevention, such as risk factors and harm-reduction strategies, as well as resources available, for those leaders to then take back to other students in their organizations. “I’m in my early 50s. I have gray hair. Students don’t want to listen to me,” Wiegand says. But students will listen to other students.
You want to increase dialogue about what even gambling is, before you can start talking about gambling prevention.
Though campuses are doing more to identify students who suffer from gambling addiction, treatment presents its own complications. There are no medications with regulatory approval to treat gambling disorders, says Marc Potenza, a professor of psychiatry at Yale University’s School of Medicine who studies addictive behavior, so most interventions, when they happen, revolve around behavioral therapy. Most campuses do not have counselors who are specifically trained to deal with gambling addiction, Nower says, which shares similarities with substance-based addiction but is also unique in certain ways. It’s generally much easier to hide from loved ones, for example, which can delay intervention. Treatment is “complex,” she wrote in an email, in part because it involves addressing illogical thought processes around luck and randomness along with the root causes of why someone gambles to excess.
Levant, the gambling counselor, says he knows students who go to campus counseling centers looking for help, and “they’re finding counselors who are good people, well-trained, they do great work,” but “they don’t understand gambling addiction.” They might not be familiar with sports-betting platforms, their enticing promotions, and their lingo, such as a “same game parlay” or an “odds boost.” That lack of familiarity, Levant argues, translates to a lack of being able to address the problem properly. (College administrators who spoke to The Chronicle said that students in need can also be connected with local off-campus resources.)
For Levant and others who look around and see a mounting public-health crisis, combatting it will take more than even the most robust screening efforts, outreach, and campus counseling services. They advocate for federal regulation. At the December hearing, the Supporting Affordability and Fairness With Every (SAFE) Bet Act was discussed. Among other things, the bill would bar all sorts of industry practices, including advertising during live-sporting events, as well as limit the number of deposits that an operator can accept from a customer in a 24-hour period and ban the use of artificial intelligence to track a player’s gambling habits or create individualized offers. (It’s unlikely the bill, introduced by Democrats, will get much traction in the current political environment.)
Without proper laws in place, the scale of the problem can’t be addressed, Levant believes, and more young peoples’ lives will be upended. In an interview, Levant said that a college student he is helping was recently hospitalized for suicidal ideation after losing more than $70,000 in the span of a few months. “The way you save people from drowning,” he said, “is — don’t let them get pushed into the river in the first place.”
