It’s no secret: gambling within Kentucky’s borders has been a tough sell in the state legislature. It was the reason why Gov. Steve Beshear’s push for casinos never made it out of the Kentucky Senate, even though a majority of Kentuckians said they wanted to be able to vote on such a measure.

In 1989, the Kentucky Lottery Corporation was founded and since then, our state has used a lottery system as a point of funding for the state. In 1999, the Kentucky Lottery Corporation partnered with the Kentucky Higher Education Assistance Authority (KHEAA) to create the Kentucky Educational Excellence Scholarship (KEES) fund, according to the Kentucky Lottery Web site. Since that time, the corporation has pushed more than a billion dollars of scholarship money into the state’s universities through KHEAA, according to a Kernel article last Thursday.

Lottery detractors have all the right things to say — lotteries prey on people at the lowest end of the economic food chain, giving them false hope for a better future. It can turn people into chronic gamblers and ruin families and life savings. Gambling has its pitfalls and the games offered by the Kentucky Lottery are no different.

But since 1999, revenue generated by the lottery system has helped students across the Commonwealth attend any university in the state. Some students rely solely on KEES money, College Access Program (CAP) grants and other state grants for their financial aid. Without more than a billion dollars given for that cause, the more than one million awards provided by the KHEAA would not exist, most likely preventing hundreds of Kentuckians from attending college.

It’s not too hard to imagine that some of the types of people who lotteries are said to prey on have benefitted from this partnership. Everyone has a moral opinion on gambling, but no matter which side of the fence someone sits on, the fact that lottery money has helped advance education in the state is something that every Kentuckian can stand behind.

And if allowing slot machines at Kentucky race tracks, or building the casinos that Beshear proposed, can benefit education by sending more students to college or by helping more students incur a smaller amount of debt, maybe Kentucky should take a stronger look at those options. In times like these, where tuition goes up, funding goes down and students are left to struggle in the middle, any extra dollar counts, whether it comes from a casino, a lottery ticket or a scholarship foundation.