House Education Committee Tackles Gambling Among Students

When a student is struggling with alcohol or drugs, you can often see it in their eyes or smell it on their breath. But when a student is struggling with gambling, “it’s invisible,” said Lindsey Mortenson, chief mental health officer at the University of Michigan. 

“There’s no blood test. There’s no brain scan,” she added while testifying Wednesday before U.S. House lawmakers. 

Mortenson and three other experts from across the country told members of the congressional Subcommittee on Higher Education and Workforce Development that the nature of the problem makes it all the more difficult—and important—to address. But despite the challenges, they called on lawmakers to take specific actions to combat the issue, such as barring sports betting advertisements on college campuses, banning proposition bets for college sports and improving financial literacy and gambling education.

Since the Supreme Court opened the doors to online sports betting in 2018, the industry has exploded. Today, at least one in four male college students report participating in online sports betting or other digital wagering, according to a recent Inside Higher Ed student survey. About one in three male students said they know others who have experienced financial distress or academic fallout because of their losses, and nearly half of them said their institutions are underresponding to the problem of digital betting, the survey found. Not all those who participate in sports betting will develop a gambling addiction, but the risks are high for college students.  

In the hearing, titled “The Rise of Sports Gambling on College Campuses,” lawmakers asked about how gambling addiction differs from other forms of addictions, why young people are particularly susceptible, how colleges should go about prevention and whether they should be concerned for their own children. 

“Online sportsbooks and prediction-market apps have placed miniature casinos in the palms of our hands, making placing a bet as easy as checking the weather,” said Rep. Michael Baumgartner, a Republican from Washington State and vice chair of the subcommittee. “We expect every college in America, every university in America to have a plan of how it’s going to deal with education on these important issues. College students are responsible for their own decisions—in many cases they’re adults—but they are going to need help understanding these risks.” 

Baumgartner said colleges should educate students about the challenges that can come with gambling and offer resources, and “we want them to do it without adding even more to the very thick levels of college bureaucracy.” 

‘People Can Lose Control’ 

Cindy Clouner, managing director of the Higher Education Center for Alcohol and Drug Misuse Prevention and Recovery at Ohio State University, said colleges can’t deal with the issue on an individual basis, particularly as students can now make wagers from residence halls, stadium seats or while sitting in class, and some see it as a vehicle for upward mobility. 

To help campuses better address the issue, the Ohio State center developed a 45-minute “gambling-neutral” training program for college students called “You Bet?” and has worked with other organizations to train adults to facilitate the training, she said. 

“While impressive work is happening in communities across the country, our current piecemeal approach is inefficient, forcing individual institutions to constantly reinvent the wheel without consistent data or resources,” Clouner said. “Higher education urgently needs a cohesive effort, a national call to action to elevate institutional awareness, national assessment data to gauge student risk and coordinated guidance to equip campus professionals with practical strategies.”

Rep. Alma Adams, a Democrat from North Carolina, called sports gambling a public health crisis on college campuses and noted its connections to anxiety, depression, debt and suicide. 

Mortenson, who is also executive director of the University of Michigan’s health and counseling center and a professor of clinical psychiatry, said she worries most about analytical young men who like sports. For them, gambling may begin with something as normal as fantasy football. 

“A lot of behaviors start out as fun, and maybe it stays that way for a lot of people,” Mortenson said. “But maybe not, and initially what was fun becomes more habitual and people can lose control.” 

The experts called for an end to proposition betting, which relates to a certain play or aspect of a game, rather than the overall score itself. 

Daniel Durkin, a professor of social work at the University of Mississippi, said that individual prop bets can expose college student athletes to harassment from people who have money riding on their athletic performance. He said athletes have reported receiving Venmo requests when they don’t perform well, pressure to perform a certain way (including pressure to alter their play or even miss a few free throws) and even death threats. 

Durkin, alongside other Ole Miss faculty, created the university’s Center on Collegiate Gambling to study gambling behavior and prevention and train counselors to work with students with gambling.

Jordan Maynard, chair of the Massachusetts Gaming Commission, said the Bay State has banned prop bets on college sports, limited sports gambling advertisements that target people under 21 and banned it outright on college campuses. 

“I think that we have to have honest conversations with young people. This is inherently risky—gambling is—and the younger you are when you start to do it, the more likely you are to experience a problem,” Maynard said.

Moving forward, Adams said, sports betting companies should respect laws and eliminate loopholes that allow underage people to participate, and she urged the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which has oversight of prediction markets like Kalshi and Polymarket, to “regulate these markets and not look the other way.”

“Students are not a market to be exploited,” Adams said. “Their mental health is not a revenue stream, and their safety should never take a back seat to someone’s investment portfolio.”

Meanwhile, Baumgartner hopes the House will revisit his legislation to ban prop bets. 

“Ultimately, we want college athletics to be about college athletics and not a commercial enterprise that can lead to problematic harassment and gaming,” Baumgartner said.