Straws in the Wind - Part 510 (Les Jeux Sont Fait)

From Inside Higher Ed: One of the country’s leading prediction markets is planning to get into the business of college admissions. Kalshi could soon add what it calls “event contracts” regarding admission rates at 22 selective institutions, including Johns Hopkins University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Chicago, according to notices filed this week with its federal regulator. Users will be able to wager whether a college’s admission rate will be less than, equal to or greater than a certain value, such as 10 percent. Kalshi plans to verify admission rates for first-time, first-year undergraduates using the Common Data Set.

...Kalshi plans to allow bets for admissions rates at the following universities: Brown University; the California Institute of Technology; Carnegie Mellon University; Columbia University; Cornell University; Dartmouth College; Duke University; Harvard University; Johns Hopkins University; the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Northwestern University; Princeton University; Rice University; Stanford University; the University of California, Berkeley; the University of California, Los Angeles; the University of Chicago; the University of Notre Dame; the University of Pennsylvania; Vanderbilt University; Washington University in St. Louis; and Yale University.

Employees and others in the admission and financial aid offices of the universities won’t be able to wager on their university’s rates. Others barred from trading include employees in the university’s communications office and other departments who might have advance knowledge of the rate. “Employees and contractors of any application platform or vendor that hosts, operates, or processes data for UCLA’s first-year applications or admissions records” also can’t trade, according to the notice for the UCLA contract... 

Full story at https://www.insidehighered.com/news/quick-takes/2026/10/23/kalshi-could-let-you-wager-admission-rates-22-colleges.