“The ticket-buying frenzy that erupted over January’s $1.6 billion Powerball jackpot wasn’t enough to reverse a long-running trend: Proceeds from lottery games aren’t keeping pace with the higher education costs they were supposed to pay.” …
Tennessee in particular shot itself in the foot by making the lottery-based Hope scholarship ubiquitous and slashing their scholarships for national merit.
Now the best students are leaving the state.
Perhaps, as the lottery revenue initially helped finance a college education for those who otherwise would not have gone to college, and those new college students took classes such as Probability and Statistics and came to the realization that buying lottery tickets was not a smart thing to do, the lottery scholarship money had the unintended consequence of decreasing the pool of lottery ticket buyers! 
There’s just something shady about most of it . . . imho.