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A Pennsylvania college student must wait until they are 21 to place a wager at a state-licensed sports book. But prediction-market platform Kalshi allows people to open accounts at 18 years old, offering a way for young people banned from sports betting to put money on the outcome of a game.
For clinicians treating gambling problems, the difference in how those products are described can matter as much as the difference in age requirements.
Dr. Cynthia Grant, a licensed clinical social worker and vice president of clinical at Birches Health, said she has worked with people who committed to stopping their sports betting or online gaming, then switched to prediction markets because they understood those products as something different.
“We don’t treat platforms, we treat people,” Grant said.
Her concern comes as Pennsylvania expands gambling-related support services and researchers document substantial online participation.
But the evidence has an important limit: Statewide findings cannot establish how widespread gambling problems are among Philadelphia college students.
The 2025 Pennsylvania Interactive Gaming Assessment conducted by Penn State estimates that 17% to 30% of Pennsylvania adults gambled online during the previous year.
The report also found the highest problem-gambling rates among people who gambled both online and offline, rather than exclusively in one setting. Participation itself is not the same as a gambling disorder.
Grouping all online participants together can conceal differences between someone using one product and someone participating in several forms of gambling, said Gillian Russell, an assistant research professor at Penn State as part of the Prevention Research Center and a co-author of the assessment.
A person might bet on sports by phone, visit casinos, buy lottery tickets and play poker, she said. The pattern of participation matters, not simply whether someone uses the internet.
For adults ages 18 to 24, she said, obtaining sufficient data remains difficult.
“One thing we know about younger people is they don’t like to answer the phone,” Russell said. “So, we’re definitely lacking some data there.”
Student status introduces another complication. Someone who works and attends school may identify primarily as employed when a survey asks for a single category, she said.
That does not fully capture differences between undergraduate and graduate students, commuters and campus residents, or people returning to school later in life.
Those limitations leave researchers unable to use the assessment to establish a reliable prevalence estimate specifically for Philadelphia college students.
