Kalshi is preparing to open new betting markets for Stanford’s 2026-27 admissions cycle, according to a notice filed with a federal regulator.
This move will allow individuals to wager on Stanford’s selectivity, using admissions rates drawn from each school’s Common Data Set. Kalshi already hosts numerous markets on Stanford sports, including basketball rankings, volleyball division championships and football matchups. Launching wagers for the upcoming admissions cycles will be the first of its kind in the betting realm.
“We’re looking at the top institutions, the very competitive universities,” Elisabeth Diana ’02, Head of Communications at Kalshi, told the Daily.
Kalshi, one of the U.S.’s largest prediction market platforms, offers consumers the ability to bet on anything. The company, along with fellow prediction market platform Polymarket, has grown increasingly popular since The Supreme Court legalized sports betting in 2018.
According to Kalshi’s filing, the prediction platform intends to open college admissions markets recurrently to “correspond to each successive Stanford first-year admissions season.” Along with Stanford, Kalshi will open prediction markets for the admissions rates of 21other top colleges and universities, including Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Princeton University, the California Institute of Technology (CalTech) and others.
The University told The Daily that they had not been informed of the market. “We do not have any additional information on what is being proposed by Kalshi,” Stanford Director of Media Relations Luisa Rapport write to The Daily.
Kalshi has not confirmed when the markets will become publicly accessible.
The addition of admissions rates to prediction platforms has sparked concerns that bad actors could manipulate rates themselves. Senior reporter for CNN Marshall Cohen noted on X that the change potentially “creates new insider trading risks at all these schools.”
Kalshi has already faced a number of scandals over insider trading. In August, the company fined former congressman George Santos $70,000 and banned him from the platform after federal investigators found he had bet against his own attendance at the State of the Union. Other bets, including an outsized $200,000 bet on the federal government’s knowledge of UFOs, have faced similar scrutiny.
Kalshi CEO Tarek Mansour has pushed back on insider trading concerns. In a response on X, he wrote that publicly traded companies experience the same insider trading risks. Mansour also said that Kalshi maintains protections against insider trading, including screening new users, outlining “Trading Prohibitions” in the filing, as well as general disclosures on its website. Mansour was previously scheduled to speak at the Graduate School of Business (GSB) on Oct. 2, but the event is currently being rescheduled.
Diana also believes few would have the capacity for insider trading on admissions rates. “Admissions acceptance rates are not really known to that many people within a university,” she said. “We list things that have economic impact. It’s just another market that we think is useful.”
Stanford has its own rules against employees betting on University affairs. “The University Code of Conduct prohibits financial conflicts of interest for employees and their immediate family members,” Rapport wrote.
Diana emphasized the role that Kalshi plays as an information aggregating platform. “The idea behind Kalshi is bringing more certainty to the future around events that matter,” she told the Daily.
“Admissions rates in aggregate are a pretty important signal of how people are doing. And people should be able to trade on those signals and also learn from them,” she said. “75% of people who are on Kalshi don’t even trade. They just look at the signals.” Research from the Federal Reserve has indicated that Kalshi is a useful tool for measuring microeconomic trends.
For those who do gamble, studies have shown that most Kalshi winnings go to a select few individuals. A July study by the Roosevelt Institute found that the top 1% of Kalshi users capture 76.5% of total gains on the platform, with the top 0.1% of traders capturing 67% of total gains.
Kalshi has not revealed the total rate of unprofitable to profitable users, though it said that there were 2.9 unprofitable users to 1 profitable user in the month of May 2026.