“In bars and restaurants, we don’t tolerate overserving alcohol,” said Lindsey Mortenson, chief mental health officer and assistant professor of psychiatry at the University of Michigan. “We shouldn’t tolerate it for sports gambling and prediction markets, either.”
Mortenson made her remarks Wednesday during a hearing convened by the House subcommittee on higher education and workforce development.
Mortenson lamented that sports gambling has “become so ingrained in daily routines, sports broadcasts, celebrity advertisements, stock-like tickers and crawlers that you could almost mistake it for gaming, entertainment, or investing.”
“Young people sometimes think of sports betting as gaming,” Mortenson said. “The industry would like us to see it that way. But gambling is not gaming.”
Lawmakers cited several staggering statistics about the toll that sports betting has taken on college students since the Supreme Court struck down a ban on the practice in 2018.
Rep. Michael Baumgartner, a Republican from the state of Washington, cited an NCAA survey that found 67% of students living on campus had bet on sports, and 16% had shown problem gambling behaviors such as wagering more money than they originally planned.
“Six percent of students reported they had lost more than $500 in a single day,” Baumgartner said. “Those figures are from 2023 and are likely even higher today.”
Daniel Durkin, associate professor of social work at the University of Mississippi, said statistics in Mississippi show why state laws against gambling are not enough to curtail gambling among college students.
Even though mobile sports betting is banned in Mississippi, Durkin said a spring 2025 survey of 1,595 undergraduates conducted by a gambling task force at his institution found 56.6 percent said they had used an online sportsbook based in the United States or Canada, and 15.4 percent reported using one outside those countries.
“We do not know where those students were physically located when wagering or whether any particular transaction violated the law,” Durkin said. “The finding does suggest that legal availability and actual student behavior do not always correspond neatly.”
Durkin said counseling is only part of the solution.
“We also must reach students who may not recognize that they need help and determine whether our efforts make a difference,” he said.
Too often, Durkin said, students with gambling problems see their problems as financial and not behavioral.
Representative Alma Adams, a Democrat from North Carolina, said while sports gambling is a “public health crisis unfolding on campuses across America,” there was still a need to be “honest about how we got here.
Adams said prediction markets have “blown a hole straight through” state restrictions on sports betting, such as age limits, how sports betting companies are licensed and other safeguards.
“By calling a bet an event contract, companies like Kalshi and Polymarket claim they aren’t gambling operations at all, but financial exchanges, so state law doesn’t apply,” Adams said. “Call it whatever you like. When a college student can wager on a game from his phone, in a state that prohibits it, that is sports betting by another name.”
Adams also accused the Commodity Futures Trading Commission of being asleep at the wheel and suggested it was related to Donald Trump Jr. having a financial stake in Polymarket.
Witnesses also took aim at the growth of “prop” bets tied to individual player performance in games – which they said put student-athletes in danger from disgruntled bettors who blame the player for their gambling losses
Cindy Clouner, managing director of the Higher Education Center for Alcohol and Drug Misuse Prevention and Recovery at The Ohio State University, called for greater collaboration among institutions of higher education to better understand the scope of sports betting among college students at a time when “gambling is accessible 24/7 in the palm of a student’s hand.
“This access is compounded by young adults viewing sports betting as a vehicle for upward mobility,” Clouner said, adding that clinicians on the ground have reported students “gambling away financial aid checks.
“Yet, because problem gambling carries deep stigma and no physical markers, the harms often remain invisible until a student is in crisis,” Clouner said.
Campus leaders find themselves under-resourced to fight problem gambling, Clouner said, citing a finding that only one in three Ohio institutions of higher education had implemented strategies to deal with the problem due to lack of data and staff capacity.
“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 risks and coordinated guidance to equip campus professionals with practical strategies.
“Consistent support will ensure colleges nationwide can safeguard student mental health, support degree completion, and strengthen future workforce readiness.”
