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The growth of online sports betting among U.S. college students has academics concerned about the increasing rates of problem gambling on campus and having enough access to player data and research funding to effectively study its impact.

James Lange, executive director of the Higher Education for Alcohol and Drug Misuse Prevention and Recovery academic center at Ohio State University, said the National Collegiate Health Assessment currently includes some 800 variables, including in relation to alcohol and drugs, but it lacks any in-depth questions on gambling.

“If you want to know the sunscreen use of college students, you can find it in the assessment,” Lange said. “But for gambling, they have one question and it’s just whether or not they’ve been diagnosed with a gambling disorder in the last year.”

Sports betting is pervasive among 18 to 22 year-olds, with 58 percent having engaged in at least one sports-betting activity, according to a survey released earlier this year by the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA).

The NCAA survey also found that sports-betting activity is widespread on college campuses, with 67 percent of students living on campus admitting they are bettors and tend to bet at a higher frequency.

The survey also found that 41 percent of college students who bet on sports have placed a wager on their school’s teams and 35 percent have used a student bookmaker.

“We need a much better surveillance of what’s happening with college students,” Lange said of sports betting. “Because this isn’t like alcohol, where you see the effect easily. You can walk around any large university at 10pm or 11pm and see what’s going on [with] the alcohol and drug abuse that’s happening.

“Finding the appropriate data that could be useful to prevention efforts of college students, that’s what we’ve been trying to do.”

Lange participated Friday (November 15) in a webinar hosted by Baltimore-based Morgan State University’s Center for Data Analytics and Sports Gaming. 

He was joined by Rod Motamedi, assistant director of the University of Massachusetts Donahue Center, Gillian Russell, assistant research professor in Penn State Abington’s Criminal Justice Research Center, and Richard Yi, director of the Cofrin Logan Center for Addiction Research and Treatment at the University of Kansas.

Motamedi noted that online gaming companies collect a ton of data on game play, including each and every wager, every time a player logs in, and whenever a player accesses a responsible gaming page.

“All this data exists,” Motamedi said. “It’s just never been enabled to allow research of that data in most places.”

Yi explained that, in Kansas, researchers currently do not have access to that type of data from the state's licensed online sportsbook operators.

He said it would take the state legislature to pass a bill to get them access to sports-betting data from college students.

“The [Kansas] Student Health [Center] and Office of Student Affairs are increasingly concerned about this, and particularly how it’s happening on campus,” Yi said. “There’s concern because Kansas has a nationally renowned basketball program and growing football program, and so the opportunities in which our students are engaged with online sports betting have become more and more of a concern.”

Yi added that every individual he has spoken with has expressed support for legislation that will allow Kansas researchers to access sports-betting data to get a better handle on on-campus sports betting.

Lange said he understood that it is sensitive data “but it can be anonymized so that it protects the individuals”.

“From a campus perspective across the nation, most campuses don’t know what’s going on with their students around gambling,” Lange said.

“We’ve been trying to seed the conversation [the] best we can by facilitating some of the stories that have come out recently about student gambling … that might get administrators on college campuses to release things are happening, because otherwise, they probably won’t see it on their campuses.”