Several years ago, as I was reading through the postings on an Internet bulletin board on blackjack, I came across a message asking for information on where one could find $25 or $50 Texas hold ‘em games. Today one can find such a high-stakes poker game online, in a nearby casino, at some guy’s house, or in any number of college residence halls or fraternities, but back then they were less ubiquitous.
What caught my eye about the message, however, was not so much the topic as the source: The message had been posted using an e-mail address at my own university. After a bit of sleuthing, I discovered that the account belonged to one of our undergraduates. That’s the day I began wondering about student involvement in gambling. What I learned surprised me, and the subsequent growth of gambling among students — along with the seeming ambivalence to it on the part of many in higher education — has given me more cause for questions than for comfort.
The history of gambling in the United States through the late 20th century has been described by I. Nelson Rose, a law professor at Whitter Law School and a scholar in gambling studies, as consisting of three waves of activity: the colonial period to the mid-19th century, the conclusion of the Civil War to the early years of the 20th century, and the Great Depression to the early 1990s.
Ken Winters, of the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, who is a leader in gambling research, and I have suggested that a fourth wave of gambling began in this country in the mid-1990s, spurred by rapid development in tribal-controlled gaming and increases in the number of states permitting casino gambling. That wave has grown to vast proportions with the advent of online gambling, an increase in the number of casinos, and the explosive growth of poker, both online and at brick-and-mortar venues. While there is some evidence that a contraction may have begun, there is little doubt that the eventual result of the fourth wave will be expanded gambling activity across the nation.
In the mid-1970s, it was estimated that the lifetime prevalence of gambling among adults in the United States was just above 60 percent, but by the mid-1990s, a similar study indicated the rate had grown to over 80 percent. More-recent data are lacking, but it seems reasonable to assume that the rate may well have increased in light of the growth of gambling activity in the fourth wave.
Not surprisingly, there has been a concurrent increase in gambling activity by college students. The 2007 “National Annenberg Survey of Youth” reports that 40 percent of college students and more than half of all college men gamble at least monthly, and that 10 percent of college students do so on a weekly basis. While Internet gambling among college students has receded from its peak activity of a year ago, the Annenberg study still indicates that nearly 400,000 college students gamble online every month.
A few students have found gambling to be a lucrative enterprise, and their successes are highlighted by gaming interests and hailed in the popular media. Watch any of the televised poker shows found on network and cable stations, and you will soon hear that one or more of the players at the table are students from this or that college. The touting of their successes serves the interests of the gaming industry, which sees two markets — women and college students — as central to its continued growth in the United States. It’s not surprising, therefore, that one need not look far to find student-marketing representatives or interns for various gambling enterprises on campuses across the country.
Many students are gambling in ways that present no risk for them other than the loss of discretionary funds. Most of us in higher education have not heard much about or from those students in terms of their gambling while in college. For other students, however, gambling may constitute violations of campus policy, athletics-association rules, or the law — for which they could suffer varying consequences. Still others exhibit behavior that classifies them as problem or pathological gamblers: From 5 percent to 9 percent of male students and 1 percent to 2 percent of female students fit that category.
Just as the news media have chronicled the successes of a few college students in the gambling realm, so too have they reported on the disasters that gambling has brought into people’s lives. Meng-Ju (Mark) Wu, a 19-year-old freshman at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, lost $15,000 in May and June of 2003. He went to his alleged bookie’s apartment and shot dead three men: the alleged bookie and his two housemates. At age 21, while awaiting trial in a county jail, Wu hung himself. In February 2006, Joseph Kupchik, a 19-year-old accounting student at Cuyahoga Community College, in Ohio, stabbed himself in the chest and jumped to his death from a parking garage after suffering substantial losses in online gambling. Greg Hogan Jr., president of his sophomore class at Lehigh University, was 19 when he robbed a bank to try to satisfy gambling debts from online poker. He had hoped that what he stole would become a large enough stake to win back what he owed.
Those are among the most dramatic examples of students brought to ruin as a result of pathological gambling. No doubt the story of 18-year-old Jeff Simon, who spoke with a reporter from The Philadelphia Inquirer in 2006 about struggling to stay in college in Pittsburgh under the weight of debts from online gambling, is more representative of the many students whose dreams are threatened, deferred, or defeated as a result of gambling.
That there is an intersection between gambling and higher education is nothing new. Some of the first colonial colleges were financed, at least in part, from lottery proceeds, and gambling on college athletics is as old as college athletics itself. States have turned to lottery revenues or taxes on other forms of gambling for decades to help support higher education.
Today colleges use various forms of gambling to help raise money for scholarships, student programs, and other worthy causes. We have licensing agreements allowing the use of institutional logos on gambling paraphernalia. We are the unwitting conduits for online gambling through our computing infrastructure. We are the focus of a substantial portion of the legal and illegal sports betting in the United States. We house research centers focused on various aspects of gambling, offer academic programs to prepare individuals for careers in casinos and casino management, and preside over professional programs that train counselors to deal with gambling addiction. Most notably, we are linked to gambling through the students we serve. For them gambling is legal, socially acceptable, and increasingly popular as a recreational activity.
How has higher education responded to the problems and perils that excessive gambling among students can create? During the 1990s, college counselors reported a surge in students seeking help for gambling-related problems. Gambling-related issues were identified as an emerging area of concern for judicial offers. The National Association of Student Personnel Administrators formed a gambling task force, and the National Collegiate Athletic Association conducted an extensive survey of student-athletes regarding gambling behavior. The Chronicle has run several articles on gambling-related issues. A few articles on college gambling have appeared in peer-reviewed journals of higher education, and Jossey-Bass recently published my monograph, Gambling on Campus: New Directions for Student Services. Nonetheless, a recent study showed that few colleges have policies or programs explicitly focused on gambling behavior, and it appears that college gambling remains well under the radar for many of us.
Model programs, however, are emerging. Researchers at Southern Methodist University recently undertook a qualitative study to better understand student choices with regard to gambling behavior. At the University of Florida and the University of Alabama, campuswide teams are developing assessment plans, education and intervention programs, and policy recommendations. Project ACE, a coalition of organizations in southwestern North Dakota that includes Dickinson State University, is working with a wide array of partners to deal with a set of interrelated social issues that inhibit the success of young people in the area. The group uses a community-based approach, focusing on identifying and using community assets — including police enforcement and training programs — to deal with gambling, while pursuing concrete goals such as legislation.
Both Oregon and Missouri have carried out statewide gambling-education and gambling-intervention programs in their higher-education systems. Those programs are examples of creative, comprehensive approaches toward partnerships to deal with gambling on campuses.
Other suggestions for colleges include:
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Develop an advisory committee to encourage gambling-education programs and respond to gambling-related incidents, or ask an existing group dealing with similar issues to take on that responsibility.
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Develop an ethical and practical institutional framework for handling gambling issues.
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Review conduct policies on gambling and campus programming — raffles as fund raisers, casino nights, bus trips to local casinos — to make sure they are in line with the institution’s mission and values as well as with state and local laws. Also make sure that student-conduct policies make explicit reference to institutional expectations about gambling behavior.
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Include questions on gambling and students’ related needs in focus groups and surveys.
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Integrate information related to gambling behavior into existing education programs, and information on problem gambling into programs to prevent and treat addiction among students.
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Distribute a list of local referral resources for off-campus assistance, including Gamblers Anonymous and similar programs, and financial counseling.
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Provide students and staff and faculty members with information concerning rates of participation in gambling and the prevalence of pathological gambling, consequences of illegal gambling, consequences of problem gambling, techniques for spotting potential problem and pathological gambling, and avenues for reporting concerns they may have about campus gambling.
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Demonstrate to other campus professionals the relationship between problem gambling and the areas for which they are responsible.
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Explore behavioral, legal, political, and health dimensions when responding to campus gambling issues.
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Attend sessions on gambling at state, regional, and national conferences to become educated on the issue.
A blind is a bet that a poker player is forced to make once every eight or nine hands when playing Texas hold ‘em, a game that has made gamblers, once viewed as degenerates, into demigods in the popular culture. Most young people can tell you that if you are at the table, then you are going to have to post your blinds, and that how you play your blinds is integral to how well you do at the table. We in higher education are at the table of the social phenomenon that is the fourth wave of gambling. How will we play the blind?
George S. McClellan is vice chancellor for student affairs at Indiana University-Purdue University at Fort Wayne.
http://chronicle.com Section: Commentary Volume 54, Issue 26, Page A33
