Elizabeth Merrill and David Purdum Aug 28, 2026, 07:36 AM ET AMIT'S MOM BARELY recognized her son when she picked him up from college. He had lost roughly 20 pounds since his parents dropped him off nearly two years earlier. He looked disheveled, with unkempt hair and a patchy beard.

He came to the University of Cincinnati in the fall of 2023 as an honors student who devoted himself to tennis, schoolwork and a dream of becoming an engineer. His parents gave him the usual warnings about drinking, drugs and wild parties, but they didn't worry too much. Then the unusual activity on their bank accounts started piling up.

So did the excuses. He flunked a few classes, dropped out of the rest and blew the rent money his parents gave him. Now it was just three weeks before finals in spring 2025, but he couldn't stay."Mom, I'm glad you got me," Amit told her on the drive home.

She didn't know what to say. A pediatrician, she has treated the maladies of other people's children for years. She had no idea how to help the 20-year-old gambling addict sitting next to her.

AS GAMBLING BECOMES ever more ingrained in American society, experts say they are seeing more cases like Amit's -- vulnerable young adults who develop addictions and parents who struggle to help them. Texas Tech quarterback Brendan Sorsby became one of the biggest stories in sports this spring when he admitted he had bet on sports in high school and college, developed a gambling addiction and entered rehab. The number of college-aged people with gambling addictions is not clear, but studies show young people are finding ways to gamble despite age restrictions, universities are scrambling to keep up and lawmakers are looking at ways to rein in the problem.

Children are exposed to gambling years before they turn 18 through video games, social media, TV ads and sometimes their own parents. A 2025 national survey by Common Sense Media found that more than one-third of 11- to 17-year-olds had gambled in some form within the past year; one in eight had bet on sports. Jim Huh, a recovering gambling addict and counselor, said he has had families with kids as young as 11 seek treatment and once saw a 14-year-old who was six figures in debt."These are things that we're now seeing that, years ago, we would probably never have seen," said Huh, who works at Gam Fin.org, a financial consultancy for people suffering gambling harm.

College students who spoke to ESPN said that betting is an accepted part of day-to-day life and that they learned about their school's gambling culture immediately after arriving on campus. A 2023 NCAA survey of 18- to 22-year-olds found that 51% of the women and two-thirds of the men have bet on sports. A senior at SMU estimated that among his fraternity brothers, it was 90-95%.

Students who live on campus tend to bet more frequently than those who do not, and most students wager infrequently and in small amounts, the NCAA found. Students found different ways to gamble, despite age limits in many states: sportsbook apps, daily fantasy sites, casinos, racetracks, offshore sportsbooks and bookies, according to the NCAA survey. Prediction markets, which have exploded in popularity in the past two years, are another option. Dr. James Borchers, chief medical officer for the Big Ten, said gambling has risen to the top of the list of concerns for schools, alongside or even above alcohol."Let's not pretend like this is some kind of fringe activity," Borchers told ESPN. "This is something that is happening with regularity amongst peers, amongst lots of people, and I think that's what concerns me ... are the behaviors going to just get worse? Because this just continues to seem to spiral out of control."In Ohio, where the legal betting age is 21, sportsbooks reported 469 instances of underage people using betting accounts in 2024, more than one a day, according to data from the Ohio Casino Control Commission that ESPN obtained via a public records request.

Three of the i...