The real crisis is not student gambling but the future that students no longer trust

When South Africans think about gambling, we tend to think about casinos, betting shops or weekend sports. Increasingly, however, gambling is finding a place in our universities: not only in physical spaces, but in students’ pockets, social media feeds, sporting content and everyday digital lives.

Public concern has focused on whether students are gambling and whether student financial aid is finding its way onto online betting platforms. These are serious questions. But perhaps they are not the most important ones.

The deeper question is this: what does the growth of gambling among students tell us about the realities of student life in SA today, and about the kind of higher education system and society we are building?

That question framed the recent South African Association of Senior Student Affairs Professionals Symposium on Gambling and Student Wellbeing. More importantly, it challenged us to move beyond moral panic and individual blame, and instead examine the social, economic, technological and institutional conditions that shape students’ choices.

For many students, higher education remains the most credible pathway out of poverty and inequality. Yet they pursue that promise while confronting rising living costs, financial insecurity, family obligations, debt and the sobering reality that a qualification no longer guarantees employment.

Widening gap between aspiration and opportunity

Against this backdrop, gambling begins to look different. It becomes less a leisure activity than a symptom of economic pressure, of uncertainty, and of the widening gap between aspiration and opportunity.

Today’s gambling platforms understand this phenomenon. They market possibility as much as they market betting, selling the idea that a smartphone and a small wager can unlock opportunities that seem increasingly out of reach through conventional means. For a generation immersed in influencer culture, side hustles and stories of overnight success, gambling can begin to look less like risk and more like opportunity.

The same is increasingly true of sport. Universities rightly celebrate sport as a vehicle for leadership, belonging and student development and wellbeing. Yet students now consume sport through digital platforms where betting odds, live wagers and promotional offers are woven seamlessly into the viewing experience.

Sporting heroes, influencers and online personalities have become powerful ambassadors for betting platforms, often normalising gambling as simply part of being a sports fan. The challenge is not to diminish the value of sport, but to preserve it as a force for student development and wellbeing while helping young people critically navigate a commercial environment in which gambling has become deeply embedded.

Perhaps this is the most unsettling aspect of the conversation. Not that students gamble. But that, for many, gambling begins to make sense. This is why gambling among students cannot simply be viewed as an issue of personal responsibility. It is also a student wellbeing issue, a mental health issue, a financial vulnerability issue and, ultimately, a student success issue.

This is where Student Affairs has an important contribution to make.

Student Affairs is where learning meets life. It is where universities encounter students not simply as learners, but as people navigating financial hardship, family expectations, food insecurity, mental health challenges and, increasingly, gambling.

Student Affairs professionals are often the first to recognise these emerging realities because they work where the academic project intersects with students’ lived experience.

Early warning system

In many respects, Student Affairs has become the university’s early warning system. It is often where society’s challenges first become visible before they appear in institutional reports or national policy debates. If universities are serious about student success, they cannot treat wellbeing as peripheral to the academic project. Wellbeing is not an “add-on”; it is one of the conditions that make learning, persistence and graduation possible.

When the South African Association of Senior Student Affairs Professionals convened this symposium, it was recognising gambling not simply as a gambling issue, but as an indicator of broader pressures shaping student life.

Internationally, this broader understanding is gaining traction. The 2024 Lancet Public Health Commission on Gambling reframed gambling-related harm as a public health challenge shaped by commercial, technological and social forces rather than individual behaviour alone. That perspective echoed throughout the symposium. Dr Thelma Oppelt of the University of the Western Cape reminded delegates that by the time a student meets the clinical threshold for gambling disorder, months of financial, academic and psychological harm may already have accumulated. Prevention cannot begin only once students reach a crisis point.

Her challenge was profound: “We, as South Africans, created the SA Association of Senior Student Affairs Professionals so that each child has an opportunity to go to university if their family cannot afford it. What are we doing when someone comes and takes that opportunity away?”

Mental health practitioners from the South African Depression and Anxiety Group (Sadag) and the Southern African Association for Counselling and Development in Higher Education reinforced this message from another perspective. Students rarely seek help because gambling is their presenting problem. They seek help because they are anxious, overwhelmed, depressed or suicidal. Gambling often emerges later, alongside debt, shame, food insecurity and fears of academic failure.

Where multiple vulnerabilities converge

Often, gambling is where multiple vulnerabilities converge. Moses Nkambako, President of the South African Union of Students, noted that “Students are consistently exposed to messages suggesting that prosperity is only one bet away. The reality is often very different. What starts with a small win can lead to bigger bets, and before long students find themselves losing money meant for groceries, accommodation and other necessities. Many end up borrowing from their peers in an attempt to recover losses, only to fall deeper into debt.”

The symposium also exposed how little SA knows about student gambling. We still lack the independent research needed to understand who is most vulnerable, how gambling intersects with student funding and debt, and which interventions genuinely work. That knowledge gap should concern us as much as the behaviour itself.

Multi-stakeholder Statement of Intent

Importantly, the symposium did not end with discussion alone. At the request of Deputy Minister of Higher Education and Training Dr Nomusa Dube-Ncube, participants adopted a multi-stakeholder Statement of Intent committing stakeholders to preventing gambling-related harm, strengthening awareness and education, improving early intervention and referral pathways, advancing independent research and evidence-informed policy, promoting responsible digital engagement and fostering collective accountability for student wellbeing. Collaboration, however, should not become a way of diluting accountability. Universities, regulators, technology platforms and industry do not carry equal responsibility.

The growth of gambling among students should concern us. But our concern should not end with gambling itself. We should also be concerned with what it reveals.

It reveals students searching not simply for entertainment, but for possibility. It reveals how easily hope itself can become commercialised. And it reminds us that protecting student wellbeing requires us to look beyond the symptoms and confront the conditions that produce them.

The lasting contribution of the SA Association of Senior Student Affairs Professionals symposium may not simply be that it placed student gambling on the national agenda. It may be that it demonstrated the leadership role Student Affairs can play in helping higher education recognise emerging societal challenges before they become institutional crises.

Perhaps the most important question before us is not whether students gamble. It is whether we are creating a society in which education still offers a more convincing promise than chance. Because the true measure of a society is not whether its young people are willing to take risks. It is whether they believe their future depends on taking them. DM