Schools partnering with betting houses are auctioning our kids off for cash.
Schools partnering with betting houses are auctioning our kids off for cash.
I n December 1903, Harvard University president Charles William Eliot identified a pernicious force on his campus that he believed was causing “dyspepsia” among his students. He blamed this new phenomenon for an increase in fighting, graffiti, and pranks at the school. Eliot claimed its presence was “demoralizing” the young men on campus.
He was talking, of course, about hot dogs.
Evidently, the presence of the encased meats was provoking hooliganism. Eliot ordered them banned from campus and ordered the “midnight lunch” counters that served them closed.
For as long as parents have entrusted colleges and universities with their children, schools have tried to enforce whatever classified at the time as “morality” on their students — even if it meant protecting them from tube steaks.
But today, this policy of molding young people into upstanding adults has often gone awry. Take, for example, schools’ implementation of “speech codes” meant to dissuade uncomfortable utterances. With the courts mainly casting out such codes, schools have turned to “bias response teams” and language guides to create more refined students. For instance, at Stanford, students are now told it is “harmful” to describe someone on a computer as a “user” because of the word’s association with “those who suffer from substance abuse issues.”
In the past couple of years, the concept of in loco parentis — schools acting as if they have not only an educational responsibility but also a moral one — has been flipped on its head by schools foisting new vices on their impressionable young students.
Most notably, schools are selling access to their students to gambling organizations for millions of dollars.
As detailed in a recent New York Times report, colleges and universities now routinely sign sponsorship deals with gambling websites, complete with financial incentives to get their students hooked on money lines and parlays.
In September 2021, for instance, Michigan State University entered into an $8.4 million agreement with Caesar’s Sportsbook that allowed the company to promote gambling on the campus.
Louisiana State University — also a state school — signed a similar deal with the sportsbook in 2021, which prompted the university to email its students, many of them under the age of 21 and thus unable to legally gamble, urging them to start placing bets. One student who showed up on campus said the school immediately sent him a “promo code” to start betting.
As the Times notes, when the University of Colorado Boulder signed a gambling agreement in 2021, the deal actually included a provision that paid the school $30 for every student that signed up to start placing bets.
This model only conforms to the principle of in loco parentis if the “parentis” in question is a cigar-chomping wiseguy collecting bets with a baseball bat.
So, not only are students no longer being protected from potentially dangerous vices, schools now have a financial incentive to get them hooked. Your kids are on the auction block.
Of course, there is nothing wrong with consenting adults engaging in games of chance, if that is what they want to do. But it is entirely a different scenario when a university, acting as a moral authority, pushes sports betting on its captive audience. And it’s even worse when a government-sponsored school does so to convert its young adults into dollar signs.
These schools are preying on young people who are already facing more financial challenges than students have at any time before them. Tuition increases already have students taking out more in loans than they can afford, and now the schools are tempting these cash-strapped kids to escape their dire financial pressures by betting what little money they have on sports.
Universities are already involved in a toxic cycle in which they bleed their students for cash. Schools raise tuition in order to hire more administrative staff and counselors, which prompts the federal government to flood the system with trillions of dollars in student loans. Seeing this influx of cash, schools then raise tuition even higher, forcing students to take out even more in loans.
Thus, when schools say they want to keep college “affordable,” they always mean they want more taxpayer aid and public loans — it never means “keeping tuition down.” Like the bookmakers on the corner, everyone gets their cut.
The gambling imbroglio is no different. In states where gambling is legal, students were already throwing money down on football games on the weekends. Now, however, schools think they are entitled to their cut of the action.
But the schools know how gambling works. The casinos in Las Vegas don’t get to build replicas of the Eiffel Tower and Statue of Liberty because people win. Any university that offers a statistics course but also profits off student gambling should be decertified.
Even before it started receiving the blessing of school administrations, gambling was a growing problem on campuses. According to recent studies, 6 percent of students have a serious gambling problem, well above the 1 percent found nationwide. Researchers have even found that gambling on campus routinely causes “psychological difficulties, unmanageable debt and failing grades.”
And it’s just getting started.
In addition to the financial benefit, the official sanctioning of student gambling allows schools one more private social issue upon which they can infringe. There are virtually no personal interactions that take place among students on campus that the university does not now control.
Learning to get along with students of different colors and nationalities? Not good enough — your school will require you to take diversity, equity, and inclusion courses.
Growing up and learning how to engage in adult sexual relationships? Slow down there, buddy — not before you attend “Sex Week,” which includes seminars called “Masturbation Nation,” “Pop, P***ies, and Politics,” “Road Head: The Role of the Automobile in American Sexuality,” “Your Hair Down There: Pubic Hair Removal and Genital Self-Image,” and the (mercifully) briefly titled “Butt Stuff.” (All of these are real seminars hosted over the years by the University of Tennessee-Knoxville.)
And now, schools will be involved in their students’ business when it comes to gambling. As in, “profiting off sending students to their financial ruin.”
Take, for example, the college student who, on September 24, 1994, stood atop his house and hurled a deck chair from the roof, watching it explode after hitting the ground three stories below. That student had just watched the University of Colorado’s Kordell Stewart throw a 64-yard Hail Mary pass to beat Michigan, ruining a four-game parlay that would have turned a $20 bet into a $220 win. The student really needed the money. (There is a better than 50–50 chance the student in question is this author.)
And yet schools now want to not only condone but endorse such behavior — for a mere $30 per student. Lawn chairs, take cover.
Of course, as more schools cash in on risky student behavior, more infrastructure will be needed. Schools will hire more gambling counselors to mitigate the ruin they have brought on their student bodies, and then will likely sign even more lucrative gambling deals. Cash begets more university employees, which requires more cash. There is no bottom.
It is clear that major colleges exist just as much to enrich themselves as they do to mold young minds into responsible adults. Perhaps one day, schools will go back to focusing on educating students, rather than protecting them from language, ideas, and the satanic sausages. But I wouldn’t bet on it.