This week administrators at Rutgers University announced the formation of a new Center for Gambling Studies — an all-purpose research center that intends to take on a wide range of issues including addiction treatment, economic analysis, and policy review.
The center will also examine the rise of online poker, according to The Star-Ledger of Newark, N.J. And that’s where things could get really interesting. Campus administrators have known for some time that Internet poker is a tremendously popular — and, in some cases, a potentially troubling — undergraduate pastime. But few of those administrators have been able to do much more than to warn students to exercise caution.
Rutgers’s new research center could, presumably, do a bit more to assess the state of online gambling at colleges. Campus officials would definitely have an appetite for some scientific studies or best-practices reports, one would think. —Brock Read
