By Brianna Kling ’25
The opportunity to be a student-athlete for Division I colleges, especially the schools that are a part of the Power Five conferences (SEC, Big Ten, ACC, Big 12 and Pac-12), is something that many people wish they could have. These “amateur” athletics have seen growth in viewership with more people tuning in each season. And although they are unpaid amateurs, sometimes the attention received by college athletes exceeds that of professionals; the biggest stadiums in the United States are the home to college football, not the NFL.
Despite their fame and commitment, college athletes struggle, mainly financially. According to ProCon.org, “Tuition shortfalls amount to thousands of dollars per year and leave about 85% of players to live below the poverty line. For example, fair market value for a University of Texas football player was $513,922. However, players lived $778 below the federal poverty line and owed $3,624 in tuition.” A quarter of D-I athletes reported food poverty, while about 15% said they were homeless at one point.
Statistics like that, and other modern issues—the wealth gap reduction and raising minimum wage—are leading to a higher demand to award these athletes with wages.
More recently, this demand can be seen in court cases and Name, Image, Likeness (NIL) deals. In NCAA vs. Alston, athletes were finally able to make money off of their NIL, meaning they could make commercials and sell gear with their own logos, similarly to celebrities (Koonz). This gave athletes access to payment that doesn’t stem from being university employees. However, there are still other problems coming from the NIL deal, including how the NCAA restricts some athletes from earning money using this method (Knowledge at Wharton Staff).
Because of these NIL issues and other problems the athletes face, they are starting to hire lawyers and take the issue of payment to courts. Lawyers representing the athletes explained that “[t]hey are not seeking pay equivalent to their market value, but only a modest across-the-board pay rate similar to those earned by work-study students” (Dale). For reference, work-study is a federal program that gives students access to part-time jobs and money to help with college expenses (“Work-Study Jobs”).
While giving them a salary might help for a short period of time, it’s not a permanent solution to these issues. Ultimately it wouldn’t be fair for all student-athletes, and it wouldn’t be fair for all college sports programs across the country. But athletes, even if they aren’t given wages, they still need better financial and educational support, and the college “amatuer” sport system needs to change.
People tend to argue that college athletes are fairly compensated through scholarships. However, generous scholarships aren’t the reality for most athletes since full-rides are only offered for a small fraction of the sports sponsored by the NCAA (“The Different Types of Athletic Scholarship Offers”). Most scholarships are also one year offers that may or may not be renewed.
On top of the lack of scholarships, athletes also have to follow strict rules from the NCAA including gambling and speech restrictions, as well as the possibility of their teams influencing class schedules, and sometimes their choice of major (Dale). By doing this, the NCAA is taking the “student” out of “student-athlete” because the athletes that won’t go professional aren’t even receiving the same high-quality education needed to be successful after university. If they can’t even control what major they take, how are they supposed to be ready for work when the vast majority of them graduate and don’t become professional athletes?
In order to fix this problem, instead of wages, colleges should provide better scholarships for the athletes since they spend over thirty hours a week participating in their sports programs. And not only does their commitment improve their athletic ability, it also benefits the universities and neighboring communities because sports become large recruiting factors and stimulate the economy in the college’s area. These athletes are dedicated to bettering the school and their community but their universities aren’t giving them the same tools they need to be successful.
If they don’t want to pay them like employees, they also need to stop treating them like employees with their regulations, and actually allow their athletes to have the same first-rate education as other students.
Another issue with college athletics is the amateur sport system that the NCAA cites as the reason they shouldn’t pay athletes; they’re supposed to be “unpaid amateurs.” The amateur sports system needs to change. President Judy Olian of Quinnipiac University said, “‘The reality is that some student-athletes among the high-profile sports in the Power Five programs have become quasi-professional athletes, competing with—and against—the majority who are true amateurs’” (Koonz).
This is a result of a lack of feeder programs for the big leagues like the NFL and NBA besides college; this then causes dominance from the Power Five conferences. If better programs were created for athletes likely to go into the big leagues, then there wouldn’t be athletes valued at hundreds of thousands of dollars competing in amateur college athletics. This change might also help prevent the exploitation athletes can face from their colleges. Better feeder programs could result in a shift of culture around college athletics allowing for college athletes to be able to focus on their degrees more instead of just their sports, while the people going professional don’t have to worry about a degree they’ll likely never use.
And again, while college athletes need better support, that support should not come in the form of wages. Paying college athletes would only end up hurting the majority of athletes and universities. Not all sports programs for colleges are profitable, so forcing them to pay their athletes might result in schools cutting programs that don’t gain revenue, and the football and basketball programs will take most, if not all, of the resources (Dale). This is already seen on a smaller scale where non-football and basketball teams get less funding, especially when they are women’s teams; wages would just amplify this issue. By preventing pay, the NCAA ensures all athletes have access to resources.
If payment starts, and wages aren’t the same for every D-I athlete, the only people who will benefit are those who would become pros anyway after two or three years in college. For them, payment doesn’t matter at university since signing bonuses alone could take them out of their college debt (if they had any in the first place). The payment would hurt the athletes who actually need support: the athletes in smaller programs and those that aren’t going professional (Abbott).
Payment could also become a method of recruiting for the top high school athletes in the country. This would end up benefiting the rich, powerhouse conferences while smaller D-I schools would be even less competitive and profitable in whatever sports they were actually able to keep.
It’s important to be wary of jumping to the quick solution of paying athletes, and other quick solutions in general. It’s easy to understand how college athletes need better support because of their tough situations but payment would only cause more problems for athletes and their schools. Instead of wanting payment as an easy way out, it’s more important to address the amateur sports program as well as support systems given to student-athletes, and to remember that these are in fact still student-athletes.
By not paying athletes outside of scholarships and NIL, and instead finding the solutions in fixing the college sports industry, all athletes would be better off.
The Raider Press 