In this fourth installment of our continuing investigation into student gambling, one issue looms larger than ever: the misuse of student financial aid to fund risky betting behavior. This is not an isolated anomaly or a cautionary footnote. It is a widespread and worsening crisis that reveals the vulnerabilities in a higher education system increasingly entangled with digital addiction and financial exploitation.
An estimated one in five U.S. college students has used student aid—whether federal loans, Pell Grants, or other education funds—to place bets, often through mobile sports betting platforms. These findings, confirmed in recent surveys by Intelligent.com and state gambling councils, expose a troubling truth: higher education is not just failing to prevent this behavior; it may be silently enabling it.
Since the 2018 Supreme Court decision that overturned the federal ban on sports betting, online gambling has exploded in popularity. Students can now place bets with a few taps on their phones, often encouraged by targeted promotions, social media ads, and campus culture. A 2023 NCAA survey showed that nearly 60 percent of 18- to 22-year-olds had engaged in sports betting, with as many as 41 percent betting on their own school’s teams. What was once considered deviant is now normalized.
Financial aid, originally intended to help students pay for tuition, housing, and books, has become a silent reservoir for gambling losses. Students who misuse these funds often do so quietly, making it easy for the behavior to go undetected until academic or financial disaster strikes. This is not only a matter of personal irresponsibility but of systemic neglect. With little oversight of how aid money is spent after disbursement, students can easily divert those funds toward high-risk activities without triggering institutional red flags.
The consequences are severe. Students who gamble with loan money frequently fall behind on rent and tuition. Some accumulate additional credit card debt. Many report heightened levels of anxiety, depression, and academic disengagement. A subset drops out entirely—often with thousands of dollars in nondischargeable debt and no degree to show for it. What we’re witnessing is the transformation of long-term educational debt into a form of speculative entertainment, with young people bearing the cost and the state underwriting the risk.
Colleges and universities, for the most part, have done little to stop this. Fewer than a quarter have any formal gambling policy in place. Counseling centers are often underfunded and untrained in gambling-specific treatment. Awareness campaigns are limited and usually reactive. Meanwhile, the gambling industry continues to rake in profits and expand its reach on college campuses, sometimes through sponsorship deals or targeted advertisements that blur the lines between athletics, student identity, and wagering.
The NFL Foundation’s $600,000 commitment to gambling awareness may be well-intentioned, but it’s woefully insufficient when compared to the scale of the problem and the profits at stake. While a handful of schools have taken steps to limit advertising or incorporate gambling risk into financial literacy programs, these measures remain the exception rather than the rule.
This is not a moral panic. It is a public health crisis driven by the same factors that have fueled other digital addictions: rapid technological change, corporate lobbying, student precarity, and institutional inaction. It is part of a broader shift toward what we’ve described in previous articles as “digital dope”—a system in which tech companies engineer compulsive behaviors for profit, and colleges quietly adjust to a reality where student attention, money, and mental health are fair game.
The normalization of gambling, especially among male students, mirrors other troubling trends we’ve reported: rising alcohol abuse, declining classroom engagement, and growing alienation from educational institutions. Many of these students are not just gambling because it’s fun—they are using it to escape a deeper sense of disconnection, uncertainty, and despair.
To meaningfully address this crisis, institutions must confront the uncomfortable truth that financial aid is being used to subsidize digital addiction. That means enforcing clear restrictions on gambling app promotions, integrating gambling screening into student health protocols, rethinking how aid is distributed and monitored, and establishing formal policies that treat gambling risk with the same urgency as alcohol or drug abuse.
In publishing our fourth report on student gambling, The Higher Education Inquirer again asks: how many warnings are needed before the problem is acknowledged at scale? How many more students must drop out, spiral into debt, or fall into addiction before administrators, lawmakers, and the Department of Education take this seriously?
The answers are not hard to find. What’s missing is the will to act.
Sources:
Intelligent.com (2022, 2023), College Student Gambling Surveys
NCAA (2023), Sports Betting Participation Data
Nevada Council on Problem Gambling (2024)
Florida Council on Compulsive Gambling (2023)
CollegeGambling.org
Time Magazine (2024), “An Explosion in Sports Betting Is Driving Gambling Addiction Among College Students”
Kindbridge (2025), “Is America in the Middle of a College Student Gambling Addiction Crisis?”
Addiction.Rutgers.edu (2024), “The Rise of Sports Betting Among College Students”
HigherEducationInquirer.org (2025), “Student Aid and Student Gambling: Risky Connection”
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