America's Future Nurses Are Betting on Kalshi and DraftKings to Pay for Nursing School, According to Survey Data from Clasp
New report reveals a shadow economy of tuition financing: more than half of healthcare students are turning to non-traditional income, including gambling, AI data labeling, and selling content on OnlyFans, to afford the one career America still calls safe
Clasp, the loan-linked hiring platform for healthcare, today released its inaugural State of Healthcare Student Finances report, the first dataset measuring the non-traditional income sources healthcare students are using to pay for school.
The survey of 1,000 U.S. healthcare students, fielded by Pollfish, finds that more than 1 in 4 (27%) have used a betting or prediction market platform. Two-thirds of student bettors (67%) treat winnings as real or potential school money: 24% say winnings are part of their plan to pay for school, and another 43% say it could help.
Nursing has been called a path to prosperity and one of the last careers AI can't replace, with the Labor Department projecting 35% job growth for advanced-degree nurses through 2034. Then, on July 1, new federal loan limits capped annual graduate borrowing for nursing and allied health students at $20,500 per year, while students in professional programs like law and medicine can borrow up to $50,000. Students are navigating these changes half-blind: 52% had never heard of the new caps, and only 32% knew their programs face lower borrowing limits than law or medicine.
