Should College Athletes Be Paid?
Should College Athletes be Paid?
College sports have turned into a multi million dollar industry that makes everyone money, except for the players who do all the work. That’s because every year student athletes sign the NCAA’s (National Collegiate Athletic Association) Form 08-3a, the “Student-Athlete” form, waiving their right to receive payment for the use of their name and image.
Like all of us, college athletes work hard and devote a lot of time to college classes. However, college athletes also spend more time in training and practice for their sport. Today I am going to discuss the large amounts of money colleges get from student athletes, the history behind student athletics, and current legal challenges to the system.
The form defines student athletes as amateurs, who cannot receive payment for playing their sports. While their schools and coaches may make millions of dollars in salaries and endorsement deals and are the highest-paid public employees in many states, student athletes can never earn a single penny from their college athletic careers. Today I'm going to share the facts, history, and economics behind college athletics in order to explain why I believe student athletes should be paid.
To begin with the NCAA says it wants to protect student athletes from being influenced by money much like professional players. Universities and colleges define athletes as amateurs. The NCAA says it doesn’t pay student athletes because it wants to maintain their amateur status and pay would compromise the integrity of intercollegiate athletics. The NCAA forces student athletes to sign away their rights because, it says it’s protecting them. The NCAA and 11 top conferences argues that paying star college basketball and football players would likely lead to a significant reduction in scholarships they are able to offer on both the men’s and women’s side.
The NCAA was created in 1906 to “protect young people from the dangerous and exploitive athletic practices of the time” according to its website. It was established under President Roosevelt to provide rules and funding in the student athletes’ best interests. The term student athlete came about in the 1950s, when the widow of a football player who died from a head injury filed for workmen’s-compensation death benefits. Did his football scholarship make the fatal collision a ‘work-related’ accident? Was he a school employee, like a student who worked at the bookstore? Or was he a fluke victim of extracurricular activities? The Colorado Supreme Court ultimately agreed with the school’s contention that he was not eligible for benefits since the college was ‘not in the football business.
Another important point is that, schools are actually making more money than ever from the revenues of televised college sports, especially the most popular men’s football and basketball. College athletics are a lucrative industry. The most visible college sports, men’s football and basketball, generate staggering sums of money. The University of Michigan football stadium, known as “The Big House,” seats over 100,000, making it the 3rd largest stadium in the world. More than 80 million fans watch March Madness, the Division I college basketball championship tournament. In 2010, CBS and Turner Broadcasting signed a $10.8 billion, 14 year deal for broadcasting rights to the tournament. Not to mention the money made on the sale of tickets, concession sales, jersey sales, and video games. However, economist and legal scholar Neil H. Buchanan says few college athletic departments “make money”; the great majority, even among the most successful, are a net drain on university finances, not a net contributor to them.
The players are the ones putting it all on the line. Sports are not a no risk situation. Players get injured quite often, and sometimes the injuries are so substantial that they completely destroy the sports career of the player. This is the type of risk that is not taken lightly by the athletes, and shouldn’t be taken lightly by the school either. They should be compensated for their risk. Rather than paying student athletes, the NCAA wants to establish funds that players could later draw on when injuries make them ineligible to play.