Loyola puts prediction markets on the undergraduate syllabus

Noah Henderson built his course around a problem the industry would rather not advertise: the regulatory line between a prediction market and a sportsbook is genuinely unclear, and young adults are standing on the wrong side of it without knowing it.

The Loyola University Chicago course, run through the Quinlan School of Business, covers commercial structure, regulation, and ethics across sports betting and prediction markets. What makes it worth examining is not the curriculum but the timing. Henderson launched it into an environment where the gap between state gambling law and federal oversight of prediction markets has become, in the past several months, a matter of active litigation in multiple circuit courts.

That gap is not abstract. Illinois requires sports bettors to be 21. Kalshi and Polymarket, operating under CFTC oversight, open to users at 18 and can offer contracts linked to college sports that Illinois explicitly prohibits. A student at Loyola can legally trade a contract on his own university's basketball game on a platform that a state regulator would not be permitted to touch. Henderson's students are studying an industry that is, in some configurations, already operating around the rules that govern their peers on DraftKings.

The consumer harm data sharpens this. Research cited in the course connects increased platform availability to riskier gambling behaviour, driven partly by smartphone access removing the friction that once slowed repeated betting. Fifteen-minute contract cycles on bitcoin price levels are, functionally, the same mechanism. Thomas — the Pennsylvania man who lost more than $25,000 on Kalshi after self-excluding from licensed sportsbooks — found the platform through an Instagram promotion offering a $20 bonus. The acquisition funnel for a prediction market and the acquisition funnel for a sportsbook are indistinguishable from the outside.

Kalshi's position — that it matches buyers and sellers rather than taking the opposite side of trades — is a real structural difference. It is not, however, a difference that changes what a 15-minute expiry contract does to someone with a diagnosed gambling disorder. The CFTC's current ruleset does not require Kalshi to honour state self-exclusion registries. That is the gap Henderson's students are being trained to understand, and it is the gap that neither the CFTC's pending rulemaking nor the Ninth Circuit's no-swaps ruling has closed.

I have been watching this space long enough to know that the harm narrative, when it arrives on university syllabuses, is not a leading indicator — it is a lagging one. The industry is already at the point where a Loyola business school is teaching ethics courses about it. That curriculum does not emerge before the harm is visible. It emerges after it has been visible long enough to write a syllabus around.

The question a prediction market should be pricing is not whether federal preemption survives — that legal trajectory looks increasingly difficult. The sharper question is whether the consumer protection vacuum gets filled by CFTC rulemaking or by Congress, and on what timeline. Henderson's course is one data point that the political cost of delay is beginning to accumulate in places regulators tend to notice eventually: classrooms, not courtrooms.