Nursing School Is Becoming a Bet. Some Students Are Taking That Literally.

The author is the founder and CEO of Clasp, a company that partners with healthcare employers to finance and repay student loans in exchange for work commitments. Nurse.org received no compensation for this article.

At Clasp, we talk to healthcare students every day, but one student said something recently that was a first. He and his classmates, he said, were spending “every ounce of our free time and dollars” betting between clinicals.

Interest piqued, we dug deeper, and that conversation ultimately led us to survey 1,000 healthcare students across the country, roughly half of them nursing students, in a poll fielded by Pollfish in the second half of June. What we found suggested his experience wasn’t nearly as unusual as we expected: 27% of respondents had used a sports betting or prediction market platform such as DraftKings, FanDuel, Kalshi or Polymarket. Nearly 70% of those students said they started because they needed extra money for school or living expenses, rather than for entertainment. Two-thirds considered their winnings real or potential school money.

At first glance, this sounds like a story about gambling. I think it is actually a story about the changing economics of education, and about what happens when a degree that should be one of the safest bets a young person can make starts to feel like a gamble.

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Healthcare students aren’t discovering betting in a vacuum; prediction markets have exploded into mainstream culture and acceptance. Combined monthly trading volume on Kalshi and Polymarket rose from less than $5 billion in September 2025 to nearly $24 billion by April 2026. Sports betting, crypto, meme stocks and prediction markets have all become part of a broader cultural fascination with finding a faster path to financial security. Commentators have even given the phenomenon a name: “financial nihilism,” the feeling that traditional financial strategies for getting ahead just aren’t cutting it anymore.

Frankly, I don’t think we should be surprised that students participate in that culture. Nor do I think there is anything inherently alarming about students finding ways to earn money while they’re in school. Students have waited tables, tutored, bartended and worked campus jobs for as long as education has cost money. In our survey, students reported everything from content creation and AI data labeling to egg or sperm donation. Fifty-six percent had used at least one nontraditional income source to cover tuition or living costs.

The more interesting question is why betting, in particular, has become attractive. One answer, at least based on what students tell us, is time. Healthcare training consumes wild amounts of it. Clinical rotations, exams, and studying don’t always leave space for a second job with scheduled shifts. As I told CNBC, time is often these students’ most precious commodity. For better or worse, a betting app offers something a shift at the local coffee shop cannot: the possibility, however uncertain, of turning a few minutes, a small amount of money, and a hunch into much more money (and a little bit of breathing room).

Culturally, that possibility is constantly reinforced. Students told us that everyone talks about the time they win, but nobody is shouting from the rooftops about the time they lose. The winners become the stories that travel through a class or a friend group, while the losses stay on the internal balance sheet, written off as an outlier or just the cost of doing business.

That creates its own kind of survivorship bias. You hear about the friend who turned $50 into $500. You don’t hear nearly as much about the ten people who tried to do the same thing and didn’t.

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Prediction markets make this dynamic particularly interesting because they can feel different from a casino. A roulette wheel is very obviously a game of chance. A prediction market presents you with charts, probabilities and subjects you may genuinely know something about. If you follow basketball obsessively, why shouldn’t you be better at predicting a basketball outcome? If you follow politics, perhaps you know something the market doesn’t.

There is some truth to that intuition. But knowing the subject and making money trading it are not the same skill.

One fascinating 2026 study analyzed 222 million resolved trades on Polymarket and found that retail traders actually picked the winning side slightly more often than chance. However, they still lost money collectively. Bots, meanwhile, were almost exactly coin-flip accurate about outcomes but made substantially more money because they were better at execution: essentially, at what price they bought and sold. Other researchers examining prediction markets have found evidence consistent with informed traders participating alongside everyone else.

That matters because every trade has a counterparty. You may feel confident that you understand the Knicks, a local election, or the price of Bitcoin. What you don’t necessarily know is whom you’re trading against, what information they have, or whether their software can execute the trade faster and more efficiently than you can.

There’s a reason for the old saying that casinos weren’t built on winners. Prediction markets may look much more like financial markets than a roulette table, but the basic lesson is still useful: a handful of visible wins can make it very easy to misunderstand where the advantage sits.

To be clear, education has always involved some uncertainty. You spend money today in the expectation that knowledge, credentials, and higher earnings will produce a return later. In that sense, every degree is a bet on your future.

But some bets should be safer than others.

Training for an in-demand clinical profession should be about as close to a slam dunk as higher education gets. You cannot become a nurse practitioner or a CRNA without the required education. You cannot simply learn advanced nursing practice on YouTube and start treating patients (at least, not legally). The credential isn’t a nice-to-have; it is the only pathway into the profession. And the healthcare system inarguably needs the professionals coming out the other side.

But the reality is, the financing structure is making the path to that credential less certain. New federal borrowing rules that took effect July 1 eliminated Grad PLUS loans for most new graduate borrowers and capped annual federal borrowing for most graduate students at $20,500, compared with $50,000 for students in programs classified as professional degrees. Graduate nursing was initially left out of the professional tier. A federal court stayed that exclusion on June 24, and the Department of Education responded with an interim list that temporarily restores the higher limits for several nursing programs, including MSN, DNP, and DNAP degrees, while the litigation plays out. The Department has doubled down saying those designations are temporary, and hinted that they’re going to fight to keep the original limits they proposed.

So today’s nursing students are planning their educations around borrowing limits that may look different by the time they need them. When we surveyed students in June, 52% had never heard of the new caps at all. And students don’t necessarily feel the constraint immediately. A nursing student may make it through the first year or two of a DNP or nurse anesthesia program before exhausting available federal financing and discovering that the remaining cost of finishing the degree has to come from somewhere else.

I call that the muddy middle. You’ve already spent years and borrowed money toward the degree, but you don’t yet have the credential (or, significantly, the earnings) the investment was supposed to produce. Walking away may mean keeping the debt while losing the economic upside that was meant to make the debt manageable in the first place. That’s a losing bet.

Private financing can fill the gap for some students, but access often depends on credit quality and cosigners. Recent analysis of private student lending found very high cosigner rates among originated loans at the lenders included in the studies. In practice, “get a private loan” can become another way of saying “find a financially secure person willing and able to guarantee it.” For many students, that’s a well-off parent. Not everyone has that.

So, students must search for another way across.

I didn’t walk away from our survey thinking nursing students need a lecture about working another job, cutting out avocado toast, or staying off betting apps.

Our respondents are already working remarkably hard to make the economics of their education work. Sixty-six percent told us they entered healthcare because they wanted to help people; only 6% said salary was their primary motivation. Despite the financing changes, only 3% said they were reconsidering their career. The problem with this cohort is less about commitment and more about the straight-up math of financing their education.

The concerning part is that, for some students, putting scarce tuition dollars into a prediction market can feel like a plausible way to reduce the risk of an educational investment that is itself becoming harder to finance. When you compare this to simply walking away from training with massive debt and no degree, it actually might make sense, or at least provide some hope.

We have managed to invert the risk equation. Training for a profession our healthcare system desperately needs should be the boring bet: put in the work, earn the credential, enter a field with massive demand for your skills. Instead, the path to completing that training can depend on family wealth, private credit or finding enough money in the margins to stay enrolled.

Some students are responding by making the gamble literal. If we want more nurses and clinicians at the bedside, we need to address the reasons why finishing an education for one of America’s most essential professions has become a bet in the first place.

🤔 Have you or your classmates turned to nontraditional income, side hustles, or betting to pay for nursing school? Tell us what you think in the comments below.

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