New associate professors launch study of college students' sports-betting

Cameron Rua-Smith

I had the opportunity to sit down with recently promoted associate professors Jordan Conwell and Michael Sierra-Arévalo to discuss their new collaboration, ACES: The American College Evaluation of Sports-betting.

Michael Sierra-Arévalo is a scholar of culture, violence, risk, and law whose prior work focuses on policing , firearms, and how police officers’ preoccupation with violence shapes their perception and behavior on patrol.

Jordan Conwell is a sociologist of education broadly interested in relationships between schooling – both K-12 and higher education – and socioeconomic wellbeing, mobility, and inequality. His research portfolio includes studies that use nationally representative survey data, others that use administrative data from Texas to make evidence-based recommendations for state education policy and applied and solutions-oriented research on college campus social problems.

ACES launched in Fall 2026 and is currently fielding a national survey of college students’ attitudes and experiences regarding online sports-betting. Michael explained that “this initial survey will be the foundation of a multi-year, mixed methods project that we plan to implement at UT, which we think is arguably one of the best places you could hope to study sports-betting among college students.”

When asked what prompted this collaboration, Jordan had this to say:

“We’ve both felt for some time now that sports are woefully understudied in mainstream Sociology, given their massive influence on so many aspects of society. Depending on how and who’s counting, sporting events now account for 90+ of the 100 most watched television programs in the U.S. in a given year. And there’s no better place to study this topic than in Texas, where sports in general, and football in particular, are a secular religion. A typical weekend for a good chunk of the state includes Friday night lights, the Longhorns or the Aggies on Saturday, and the Cowboys on Sunday. We saw a collaborative research opportunity when, seemingly overnight, the entire sports landscape reoriented itself around online gambling in ways that intersected with both of our research agendas.”

This project serves as an “extension” of both professors’ interests. Michael sees a “clear throughline” as it pertains to culture, risk, and masculinity given that young men drive the sports-betting world. For Jordan, this collaboration allows him to “ask new and difficult questions about higher education and student success.” Both professors see their ACES project as an opportunity not only within the department, but for UT as a whole. Jordan shared that “we are already collaborating with UT Shift—with whom we filmed a PSA about betting that released during March Madness—and the UT Center for Students in Recovery to think about how our research can support student wellbeing on campus.”

When asked about the larger role that this project plays, Michael said this:

“I’m a UT alum—I love this place. It’s my home. Sure, I think that ACES is important because it’s focused on a pressing problem. But our vision for ACES is especially exciting to me because it will help UT fulfill its responsibility to support our students' academic, social, and physical wellbeing. It means helping our students, here, on the 40 Acres.”

The future looks bright for these two newly promoted professors; I would bet on it.

Cameron Rua-Smith is a second-year PhD student at The University of Texas at Austin. His research examines school-to-work transitions among college students; postsecondary and labor market outcomes; and the roles that race and ethnicity play in those experiences. Cameron's other interests include inequality within higher education policy and university shared governance.