Which party will win the United States Senate? Will OpenAI or Anthropic go public first? And now, what will Penn’s acceptance rate be next year?
According to notices filed with its federal regulator this week, the prediction market platform Kalshi could soon open betting markets on admission rates at 22 elite institutions — including Penn. Users will be able to wager whether a college’s admission rate will be less than, equal to, or greater than a certain value.
The process of approving the new markets with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission will take several weeks, according to a Kalshi spokesperson.
A request for comment was left with a University spokesperson.
The markets will only include options to bet on the total application numbers and total admissions rates — not specific Early Action or Early Decision results. The company plans to open markets for all eight Ivy League institutions and several peer institutions — including Stanford University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
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Wharton School professor Abraham Wyner — who studies probabilistic modeling — said in an interview that there is always possible insider trading risk that comes from introducing new betting markets.
“Administrators are human beings, like everybody else,” he explained. “They will have a dangling opportunity, a shiny bright object that will attract them to think that they can make money.”
Still, Wyner does not believe the risk of insider trading is all that great. Due to increased scrutiny on small betting markets, he explained that it will likely be hard to translate these markets “into a substantial potential profit opportunity.”
“We have algorithms that will look for people who are betting oddly on odd events,” he added. “In other words, there’s a significant probability of getting caught.”
Kalshi plans to use the Common Data Set — as colleges report individual acceptance rates through their institutional portals — and annual disclosures that universities submit to the federal government’s Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System to verify results.
“This is just the gamification of America,” Wyner said. “Sometimes it’s just ridiculous. This one crosses into the ‘just ridiculous’ category.”
Isha Chitirala is a News Editor at The Daily Pennsylvanian and can be reached at chitirala@thedp.com. At Penn, she studies economics and political science. Follow her on X @IshaChitirala.