More Than A Game

Not long after arriving at college, in 2022, Jack gambled for the first time. It started as a social pastime. His fraternity would get together to watch a big game, and the brothers would throw some money on the outcome. For Jack, who grew up a huge sports fan, betting made tuning in for teams he already loved even more exciting. 

Over time, the stakes changed. He stopped seeing betting as a way to bond with his buddies and began thinking of it as a legitimate money-making opportunity. He didn’t just do it with a group anymore, and he didn’t just focus on the matchups typically important to him. When he won, he felt like he’d beat the system. When he lost, he resolved to win the next time.

“It definitely got to a point where I'm up late at night sweating out a bet on some stupid game that I don't care about, but have money on, so I have to care about,” Jack said. He lost time and sleep. He was distracted from studying and soured by bad bets. He worried his parents. The negative impact on his life had become apparent, but he dreaded telling his friends he might need to take a step back.

Gambling addiction is not new. But Jack’s experience captures a newer question: what happens when students come of age alongside an expanding legal sports betting industry? Since the Supreme Court overturned the federal ban on sports betting in 2018, the prominence of gambling on college campuses has come into sharp focus. By 2023, an NCAA poll of 18 to 22 year-olds found that 58 percent overall and 67 percent of those living at college had sports bet. 16 percent indicated engaging in at least one risky gambling behavior, like betting more frequently or making or losing larger sized bets.  

Concerns about the risks of gambling have spread in turn, particularly related to the pop-up predatory commercial enterprise spawned by the habit. With the emergence of sports betting apps, like DraftKings and FanDuel, bettors gained continuous access to the action, right in their pockets. Meanwhile, online prediction markets have become a popular way for anyone 18-plus, including in states where the legal gambling age is 21, to engage in thinly disguised betting, framed as buying “shares” in the probability of different events happening. Investigations into the marketing tactics of betting apps, much like social media platforms, have revealed the plethora of ways they aim to hook users and profit off the most vulnerable. 

For decades, psychologists have recognized the potential for disordered gambling, characterized, to summarize, by an inability to stop despite various negative consequences. Yet for all the strides colleges and universities have made in recent years to address widespread student mental and behavioral health concerns, problem gambling appears to have been one issue left behind. 

Student gambling experts continue to find schools largely on their heels when it comes to a proactive response. Some expect institutions are still becoming acquainted with a phenomenon that has dramatically outpaced their grasp. Others imagine administrators assume gambling is prevalent on their campus but they don’t know in exactly what ways or to what extent. 

Lindsey Mortenson, the inaugural chief mental health officer at the University of Michigan, has found herself, in a short time, among the leaders of a growing effort to increase awareness around student gambling at colleges and universities. “It’s kind of an uncomfortable moment in higher ed and just in society in general because there's really no federal funding [for] gambling research, and our behavioral health, mental health workforce pipeline is really not prepared,” she said. “Most people are just not getting any education about gambling.” 

For Mortenson, gambling on college campuses was always on her watch list but only recently on her doorstep. She first noticed the shift when the pandemic fog lifted and socialization began to return to normal. She started hearing from friends and colleagues, asking, “How would I know if my husband or my son had a problem?”

The longtime clinician had a general sense of how to respond but limited experience with the gambling issue overall. It occurred to her that the Covid-19 quarantine, which dawned right as dozens of states legalized or planned to legalize sports betting, would have bred the perfect conditions for online betting habits to fly under the radar. People often ended up alone, unmoored and unmonitored, with newfound free time to devote to unfamiliar apps designed to hold their attention.

Behavioral addictions like gambling are already known as “hidden addictions,” Mortenson said. They involve getting hooked on an activity, like shopping, food, or sex, as opposed to a mood-altering substance. These behaviors might be done in private, and the effects, while mimicking a chemical “high,” aren’t necessarily immediately obvious.

Eric Wood, the director of mental health and counseling at Texas Christian University, added that online sports betting is unique among addictions because there’s no “lag time” involved. Unlike with drinking, for example, online bettors don’t need to take the time to procure alcohol and then consume it. They can fire off bets instantaneously, at any point their phone is in reach. They also don’t need to wait to “recover” from one bet, like they might with a hangover, before making another. 

Bettors can even engage in many schemes at once, either on different games or within the same ones. With parlays, a popular form of bet, multiple predictions, referred to as “legs,” are linked and must all come true to win. So a bettor might bank on a certain football team to win, as well as to win by a certain number of points. He might end the bet there, or stack on another 10 legs to up the ante.

The brains of emerging adults, still developing impulse control, are vulnerable to this reward cycle. Young men appear to be particularly susceptible. According to the 2023 NCAA survey, 33 percent of men bet a few times a month or more, compared to 20 percent of women. Mortenson said the reason for this difference may be social more than biological. “Because sports are such a big part of male culture and you have this frictionless, easy way to keep betting continuously,” she said. “It just is uniquely reinforcing and addictive.” 

Perhaps most troubling to Mortenson, though, is everything researchers still don’t know about the harms of gambling among young people. While betting companies have access to data about usage—how many students, how often—they’re not exactly eager to share it. 

“It’s hard to really quantify all the harms,” Mortenson said, “because they're sort of under corporate lock and key.”

Risky Fun

Before Jack entered college, the world of sports betting was largely unknown to him. “I'd maybe heard a little bit [about it] in high school, but I certainly wasn't doing any,” he said. 

These days, Jack’s limited exposure before college seems less likely for incoming college students. Rob, a current first-year at another university, was well acquainted with betting by the time he arrived on campus. A study published last month found more than 40 percent of 13 to 17 year-olds had gambled in the previous year. 

Rob described a gambling culture that took over his boarding school. Seniors ran sportsbooks and invited other students to join. Around the country, these kinds of student “bookies” build websites or spreadsheets to facilitate illegal betting among their often-underage peers. The ones Rob knew encouraged participation by providing membership for free and bonus cash to those who referred friends. In a small place, word spread fast.

Eventually the school administration cracked down on these enterprises, making them a dismissible offense, but not before Rob heard rumors about kids in the grade above him selling personal items, like bedsheets and posters, to pay off their debts. He stopped betting after his “bookie” graduated, then disappeared, never paying Rob an outstanding $1,000 he had won. 

For Chris, another first-year college student, gambling constituted a more casual affair at his high school, at least until students turned 18. As underclassmen, his friends would toss around bets on a Sunday football game and agree that the loser had to pay for pizza, or some equivalent. It was once they could download the betting apps legally that his relationship with gambling changed. 

In the months before he left for college, Chris said he spent entire days betting. He grew frustrated by hours wasted wagering on “U18 girls tennis matches in Slovakia,” rather than making the most of his summer. He placed his final bets on the World Cup ending in July, and cut himself off.

But when Chris started college, the betting started up again, too. His new friends bet. He made one close friend because of betting. “When everyone's making friends, this was something which we felt like we had a similar interest over, so we'd hang out and discuss it,” he said.

The social component of betting seems to make picking it up easy and stopping even more difficult. For Jack, admitting to himself that his betting had become a problem was one thing. Admitting it to his friends was another.  

“I had good friends; they were good people. They weren’t like, ‘No, you gotta spend more money,’” he said. “I guess more of the worry was like, ‘Okay, I'm pulling myself back from a social avenue and a group that I really enjoy.’" 

Jack told his friends he needed to cut down, and they understood. He also didn’t stop hanging out with them. From time to time, betting beckoned. Especially after a couple drinks, few odds seemed too long. 

“It’s hard to get away from, I guess, is what I'm trying to say,” Jack said, “just with all the social pressure that comes with it.”

Understanding What’s at Stake  

Gambling may now be part of the participatory social fabric as early as high school, but luckily, not every student who bets will develop a betting problem. In fact, the vast majority, the numbers suggest, are able to bet responsibly. 

Rob’s trajectory with gambling seems to reflect that room for middle ground. “There's so much going on all the time that there's a bunch of other things to do other than watch sports, and then sports betting becomes less of a thing,” he said of his college experience so far. 

But the distinction between who is and isn’t a high-risk gambler isn’t always easy to parse. Monetary wins and losses, for one, don’t necessarily capture the entire depth of someone’s problem. 

Isaac Rose-Berman is a professional gambler now, but in 2020, he was a sophomore at Brandeis University, playing poker up to 10 hours a day during the Covid-19 shutdown. He’s open about the fact that, at that point, he exhibited telltale signs of problem gambling. And, he said, he made “pretty solid money” doing it.

“Like other activities that are iterative, if you do way too much of something, you can get better,” he added.

Still a pro today, Rose-Berman said he’s been able to shake the compulsive nature of his gambling, much of which is now sports betting. Meanwhile, he became a gambling policy and research fellow for the American Institute for Boys and Men (AIBM), advocating for stricter regulations for betting apps and educating people about how to bet safely.

In some ways, in his role for the AIMB, Rose-Berman spends his time trying to convince young men he’s something they should never expect to be: the exception. He may have made a career out of betting, but that doesn’t mean others can. Time and again he encounters students who seem to understand betting comes with risks, but they think they’re too good to fall victim. 

“A lot of what I try to explain to them is just how rigged the game is against them, how unlikely it is for them to win, who they're going up against,” Rose-Berman said.

In their conversations with LearningWell, Jack, Chris, and Rob all expressed in some way that their gambling habit emerged in part because they were skilled at it—that they found unlikely success.

When Rose-Berman addresses students, he likes to lead them through one particular exercise. He asks everyone who uses DraftKings to raise their hands. Then he instructs them to keep their hands up if they think they’re “really good” at gambling. Many hands tend to stay raised.

“I'm not saying you guys are liars, but I have some very good friends who work on the risk management team at DraftKings, and their entire job is figuring out who is good at gambling and kicking them off the platform,” he tells them. “So if you're still on the platform, that's pretty good evidence that you're probably not that good at gambling.’” 

Rose-Berman watches the gears shift in students’ heads as they realize, perhaps, they aren’t quite as talented as they imagined. Some of those who figured themselves stars hadn’t even been tracking their wins and losses. 

Rose-Berman’s goal isn’t to tell students to gamble or not to gamble but to clarify the potential risks, so they can proceed more safely. Breaking down what he called the “illusion of skill” is an important step.

On the essence of his gambling philosophy, he said: “I love gambling, but I hate gambling companies.” He sees bettors being set up to fail by corporate predation. As for the activity itself, he doesn’t believe gambling is inherently bad. Under the right conditions, he said, it could be a social good.

“You hear about the male loneliness epidemic,” he said. “I think that a bunch of guys getting together and playing poker is really good when people are very socially isolated, and especially if it's for small stakes and they don't care about the money.”

Rose-Berman also believes there’s value in learning the hard lessons about gambling early in life. If they’re like him, students will feel grateful they took wrong turns in college, instead of when they’re older, with more money to lose and responsibilities at stake.

“I think I was always destined to make a lot of those mistakes,” he said. “If I had started gambling later, then I would've had that realization at 25 instead of 21.”

What Schools Can Do 

In 2022, the team at the Higher Education Center for Alcohol and Drug Misuse Prevention and Recovery (HECAOD) at the Ohio State University decided to adopt gambling as a new focus area after learning about the extent of sports betting among students from an investigation in The New York Times.

It didn’t take Cindy Clouner, HECAOD’s managing director, long to realize they had entered uncharted territory. She set out looking for student affairs associations already addressing gambling who could help guide them into the fray, only to come up empty. 

Clouner soon understood that arriving at the resource she needed would require starting it from scratch. In 2023, HECAOD launched its collegiate problem gambling work group, bringing together individual leaders in college gambling research and programming to think through how to expand readiness and capacity among campus professionals around the country.

Theirs has been an uphill battle. Only the rare school had existing strategies up and running for them to draw from. Most colleges lack data around the prevalence of gambling among their students, Clouner said, because the activity hasn’t historically been included in surveys about their health and wellbeing. Funding for additional research is also minimal because there’s no federal support in the area, excluding a recent designation for the Department of Defense to consider the issue among military personnel.

However, Clouner said, the situation is not without hope: there’s reason to believe that some of the evidence-backed strategies effective for addressing substance misuse can also help with problem gambling.

On an individual level, one of the gold standards for addressing problem alcohol use is called a motivational enhancement approach. It involves talking to students about the issue in a neutral way, framing it as not good or bad but as an activity with risk of harm. They then can discuss ways of limiting that risk. This same framework may translate to conversations about gambling, Clouner said, to help students build targeted knowledge and skills.

As for larger scale efforts, Clouner described how the kind of bystander trainings typically offered for drug use or sexual assault might be expanded or adapted to include gambling—to help students know what warning signs to look out for, how to talk to peers they’re concerned about, and how to connect them to resources. Mass media and social norming campaigns are other potential modes of spreading this kind of information.

“It isn't widespread knowledge what the things [are] that people should do to reduce their risk of experiencing harm from gambling,” Clouner said. “It isn't something that people just innately know.”

In 2025, HECAOD received a grant from the National Council on Problem Gambling, one of the key funders in this area, to develop a student-facing educational program called “You Bet?” informed by the expertise of their working group. "If you have 45 minutes with students,” they asked themselves, “what do you think are the most important things that they need to know about this issue?" So far, they’ve trained over 400 people to be able to deliver the program to students on their campuses.

At the University of Mississippi, broad strokes efforts are underway to understand the gambling issue on not only their campus but seven of eight other public institutions in the state. 

Daniel Durkin, a professor of social work at Ole Miss, helped organize a survey of student gambling habits across all seven universities. Collected in spring 2025, the data suggest that 40 percent of students had gambled in the past year, mostly playing the lottery (18 percent), playing cards (17 percent), or sports betting (16 percent). The students most likely to gamble included white men living off campus, participating in athletics, and involved in Greek life. They also had higher GPAs.

“We did that survey, got the results back, [and they] told us we already have a problem,” Durkin said. From there, he worked to get Ole Miss approval from the Institutions for Higher Learning to launch the Center on Collegiate Gambling, which calls itself the first of its kind in the nation entirely dedicated to research and the development and promotion of prevention efforts. The provost’s office is funding at least the first stage of growth, opening the doors to hiring a director and other staff, ideally, by the end of spring 2027.

One of Durkin and his colleagues’ first moves was to assemble a campus task force to assess current programs and policies on campus and make recommendations for going forward. Another was to train counseling staff to recognize and be able to respond to problem gambling. Once Ole Miss has put on its proverbial oxygen mask, the university hopes to help others in the state dawn their own, developing approaches tailored to each campus gambling situation.

Other universities that don’t have a dedicated hub for gambling research or prevention have begun to address the issue piecemeal.

At Texas Christian University (TCU), the director of counseling, Eric Wood, has embedded a gambling screening into the intake questionnaire that every student fills out upon visiting his center. While it’s not uncommon, he said, for students to deny or undersell their gambling habits on the form, asking the question upfront opens the door for more discussion in counseling sessions. There, Wood added, he finds students are often willing to talk about their engagement.

Those who initially underestimate their gambling habits may not even be doing so on purpose. Yes, some aren’t ready to admit to a potential problem, Wood said. But others simply aren’t aware that some of their habits, like small bets with friends over video games or fantasy leagues, qualify as gambling. 

Students engaging in problem gambling also haven’t been likely to seek out counseling for specifically that reason, Wood said. Rather, it might be general anxiety that brings them into the center, and then later conversations about betting that helps them realize it’s a key source of their distress. Once they begin to connect the dots, they can get the support they need.

Another of Wood’s interest areas involves the e-sports lounge at TCU. These kinds of video gaming centers have cropped up on college campuses in part to build community around a popular activity that might otherwise leave students isolated. Wood is thinking, though, about how the wagering in that environment might be monitored or curbed by putting out educational resources, like pamphlets or posters.

“If you have [a lounge] on campus, you know the students are placing bets in there,” he said. “Do you need to put signs in it? Is a school liable if something were to happen? Those are questions no one has the answer to.”

As with all forms of human behavior, relatability offers a strong intervention. Isaac Rose-Berman, while not affiliated with any one university, will no doubt continue speaking to young people on campuses across the country—young men in particular—trying to provide the education they’re missing around their new favorite form of entertainment. He and others like him, who are recent graduates, gamblers, and purveyors of caution, might just strengthen the voice in students’ heads that reminds them what’s at stake.  

When Jack graduated from college, he moved to New York City, where he said his gambling has improved, meaning dwindled. At times, he’ll admit, the voice of reason can be difficult to make out over the sounds of betting—blaring ads, bullish friends—across Manhattan. For now, he’s listening closely.

Jack, Rob, and Chris' names were changed for this story to protect their anonymity.

You can reach LearningWell Reporter Mollie Ames at mames@learningwellmag.org with comments, ideas, or tips.