Ole Miss has announced plans to take a major step into understanding and exploring the largely uncharted waters of college gambling and college sports betting.
Key Takeaways
- The University of Mississippi is launching a new center focused on studying and addressing college gambling and sports betting.
- The initiative aims to advance research, promote policy changes, and provide support resources for students and student-athletes.
- The move follows findings that 39% of students gambled in the past year.
In an announcement Tuesday, the university expressed goals of leading efforts to better understand and address sports betting in collegiate sports, as well as to protect students in various ways.
“Around two years ago, we invited an expert on gambling to come speak to us, and after his presentation, I became very alarmed,” said Daniel Durkin, associate professor of social work. “We were seeing a developing gambling problem, and not a whole lot of people were actually doing anything about it.”
The effort, which began as an informal group consisting of faculty such as Durkin as well as students, will serve as something of a task force on the subject, with plans to “advance understanding of college student gambling behaviors ranging from card games to proposition betting and prediction markets through academic research.”
Additionally, the center will seek to promote policies and programs across campus with the aims of protecting both student well-being and student athletes, such as inviting training counsellors to help students dealing with problem gambling.
Enjoying Covers content? Add us as a preferred source on your Google account“When we started, we also started going to national gambling conferences and that's where we realized that more direct efforts were needed in the collegiate gambling space,” Durkin added. “There was a need for a center focused specifically on collegiate gambling.”
Gambling among young adults an increasing concern
According to one study from the University of Mississippi, one which helped green-light the center, upwards of 39% of college students had gambled in the past year, with as many as 6% meeting the criteria for problem gambling, according to the American Psychiatric Association.
The findings are particularly notable given the prominence of Mississippi sports betting, which has helped normalize wagering activity across the state, though not without pushback, including a recent failure to expand into online sports betting.
“From the research findings, we were able to say, 'Here's what we need to see on our campus in terms of prevention, education, policy, intervention and treatment for students that need it,'” said Hannah Allen-King, executive director of the university's William Magee Institute for Student Wellbeing. “So, in the fall of 2026, we will have more of a dedicated campus plan to address gambling.
“We really think that this is an issue that affects Mississippi at large.”
