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The Case for Paying College Athletes
The Case for Paying College Athletes
Introduction
College sports are not mere sideshow but a massive business that makes millions of dollars selling tickets, merchandise, as well as TV contracts. Each season, millions of fans who watch their favorite teams on TV fill stadiums. This leads to earning of massive profits by colleges, coaches, and sponsors. However, beneath all the glamour and excitement lies a less glamorous reality: student-athletes, whose abilities and diligence enable all of this, seldom receive substantial financial compensation. Scholarships are given to the majority of student-athletes, but they frequently fall short of covering the actual cost of living and the sacrifices that athletes must make for their sport. Since a long time, the NCAA has maintained strict rules against directly paying athletes. They assert that college sports will go ‘amateur’ once players do start getting paid. In fact, it is the schools, networks, and sponsors that benefit and not the players themselves (Haile, 2023). To add to this, many college athletes put in about 30-40 hours a week into training, travelling and competing. Due to this heavy schedule of events and competitions, many athletes cannot take outside jobs anymore and are struggling financially (Haile, 2023). On top of this, athletes put their bodies on the line every game, facing injuries that can not only end their sports careers but also affect their long-term health. Because of their time commitment, the unfair system, the fact that they are the ones driving the money, and the risks they take with their health, student-athletes deserve to be paid fairly.
It is not unjust to pay student-athletes due to the equal amount of time they give their sport on full-time basis. College athletes have between 30 and 40 hours per week in practice, training, traveling and competing. It is this amount of time the majority of the adults spend at a full-time job (Pacenta et al., 2024). In the case of athletes, this period is physically demanding besides being highly psychologically straining as they combine sport with academics. These long hours leave them with small time or energy to pursue outside employment hence cannot earn additional money to sustain their personal bills. Some of them are awarded scholarships, however, these are not always reflective of the actual expensive cost of living. Most of the athletes are yet asked to finance food and accommodation, clothing and transportation costs out of their own purse which may be hard to do without a stable income generating process. This puts an unjust state of affairs where sportspeople are dedicating their time, met, and efforts to a billion-dollar business and still failing to have the ministry needs (Delventhal, 2021). Due to the high demands of the schedules along with the nature and lapses of the financial sharing, it is but natural to expect that student-athletes deserve to be rewarded by their devotion.
References
Delventhal, M. L. (2021).
A Latent Class Analysis Predictive Modeling Approach to Profile Division I Collegiate Athletes for Nutrition and Relative Energy Deficiency in Sport (RED-S) Concern. The University of Mississippi.
Haile, A. J. (2023). Equity implications of paying college athletes: A title IX analysis.
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64, 1449.
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Pacenta, J., Starkoff, B. E., Lenz, E. K., & Shearer, A. (2024). Prevalence of and contributors to food insecurity among college athletes: a scoping review.
Nutrients,
16(9), 1346.
