With football season starting and baseball nearing the World Series, it’s hard to walk around campus without hearing about someone’s latest parlay or fantasy lineup.
But it’s not just the fall and approaching tournaments that bring an influx of gambling activity.
Since the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act was struck down in 2018 — ending the federal ban on sports betting — the popularity of online gambling and betting has increased, especially among younger, college-aged bettors.
According to Brooke Rollins, an associate English professor at Lehigh who’s currently writing a manuscript for a book on the rhetoric of gambling, the activity’s popularity at Lehigh and colleges across the country is more than just a fad for millions of students.
She said last year, Americans wagered around $170 billion on sporting events, and most of it happened on phones.
“It’s just become such an innate part of our lives,” Rollins said.
When discussing why online betting has become the major source of gambling revenue, Rollins pointed to the relationships people have with cellphones.
Phones allow bettors to gamble without ever leaving the couch, with almost everything at their fingertips.
“You can go on your phone and not just bet on sports, but play blackjack and slots,” Rollins said. Everything you could play in the Bethlehem Casino, you can play on your phone.”
Rollins said young men are especially at risk for the formation of a gambling habit, as they’ve become the target audience for online gambling and gaming companies.
In a report from CNN, college-age adults gambling on prediction markets are now concerning addiction experts. Prediction markets are an increasingly popular new form of gambling which allows bettors to gamble on the outcome of future events.
The targeting of young people worries Frank Gunter, a professor emeritus of economics at Lehigh.
“One of the things I find very disturbing is that since we moved from casino gambling to online gambling, it’s targeting younger and younger people,” Gunter said. “Common Sense Media did a study showing that 49% of 17-year-old boys have gambled online before.”
Gunter said for young people the adverse financial effects of losing can often be worse, adding financial stress to the existing pressures of college life.
What’s mainly encouraging students betting at Lehigh isn’t the proximity to Wind Creek Casino, but the seamless nature of online gambling.
Rollins said the ease and familiarity of online gambling, coupled with the fast normalization, has caused a frictionless environment for gambling culture to grow on and off campus.
“It wasn’t a slow cultural drift; it happened really fast, and I think when gambling becomes so frictionless, it stops being this kind of discreet activity,” Rollins said. “We don’t even have any distance from it.”
“I think it’s not that people are more gambling oriented,” Gunter said. “It’s that the way we gamble now is incredibly pernicious.”
A sophomore at Lehigh, who asked to remain anonymous due to the personal nature of his gambling habits, said he’s been gambling online for the past two years.
He said he was checking betting apps three times a day at the height of his usage.
At 18 years old, he was introduced to the world of online gambling by a friend who told him to try betting on Kalshi because of their “trade $25, get $25” incentive.
From there, he began betting in bitcoin prediction markets and on the outcomes of soccer matches.
“It’s mostly just losing, and then eventually you’ll get a little bit of a win,” he said.
He also said he’s trying to cut back on online betting and prediction market apps, such as Kalshi and Polymarket, but he wants to wait until after the Champions League finishes before he does.
“I feel like I lie telling myself that because it’s online, it’s different,” he said.
He said he separates in-person and online betting in his mind. He tells himself gambling in-person would be “crossing a line,” but said it’s easier to rationalize online betting, even though he’s still losing money.
Rollins said gambling culture has permeated beyond the individual, to being normalized in popular culture and amongst friends.
A senior at Lehigh, who also asked to remain anonymous, has been gambling online since he was 18 years old. He said gambling and betting have been recurring themes in his friendships.
“With the NFL (season) starting, it’s definitely big talk with (friends),” he said. “The other day, we were watching a football game, and we were just talking about sports picks for a while.”
The sophomore at Lehigh said that when he’s watching a sporting event with friends, betting is just as natural a topic of conversation as the game itself.
“If we’re gonna watch a soccer match, you know we might as well (talk about sports betting),” he said.
For the Lehigh senior, it’s more than just online gambling that he shares with his friends. He says he goes to Wind Creek once every two weeks at most, but never alone.
“I love that whenever I go to Wind Creek, I’m going with my friends,” he said. “We’re all together enjoying ourselves. But I also do like doing it on my phone as well, because it’s right there. It’s more instantaneous”
He also described the casino experience as far riskier in comparison to online betting, due to the higher table stakes, with minimums around $10.
The Lehigh senior has budgeted his online gambling, capping his spending to around $20 a week. But even smaller bets begin to add up.
The Lehigh sophomore said it’s the thrill of winning that keeps him going in the face of losses.
“The second you get a win, you’re gonna start wanting to win more and more and more,” he said. “Let’s say I lost $20, but I made $30. Instead of stopping there, I’m just gonna go ‘Oh, I made $30 already. So, why not just put in all the $30 again?’ Just keep on gambling, keep putting in more money.”
He said he ends up making back most of the money he loses.
Rollins said the gambling habits of Lehigh students aren’t isolated incidents of attraction to an addictive hobby. They’re products of a wider culture that has normalized and popularized gambling.
“It has become infused in culture,” Rollins said. “It’s fine to talk about it now, it’s not a thing you need to hide.”
From loot boxes in video games to the blind box craze, Rollins said she sees everyday trends and activities as instances of micro-betting, training people to move through the world thinking about life like a wager.
“It’s like the entire world has become something we can gamble on,” Rollins said.
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