“Despite the hours I put in every day, practicing, learning plays, and traveling around the country to play games, and despite the millions of dollars our team generated for UCLA—both in cash and in recruiting students to attend the university—I was always too broke to do much, but study, practice, and play” (Abdul-Jabbar).Today, there is still a major issue concerning college athletes and money. Universities, colleges and the NCAA makes billions of dollars through their athletes while some student-athletes actually go hungry. Currently, there is a huge controversy over whether or not student-athletes should be paid as employees hired by their university or college. There are many who believe that college …show more content…
According to Smartasset’s article, Should College Athletes Be Paid?, “One aspect I find lacking in this topic discussion is the ignoring of the very real fact that a lot of athletes are very financially irresponsible. The ESPN documentary Broke gave an inside view of the financial woes of many professional athletes, noting that around 60% of NBA players are broke within five years of retirement” (Patterson). This article provided a significant amount of evidence that many professional athletes were unable to control their assets. These athletes made “poor investments trusting unethical financial advisors and lavish spending habits as the reason for their money troubles” (Patterson). The new found money of the professional athlete who was most likely a previous college athlete needs financial skills to help keep their money intact. Unfortunately, most these college athletes are educationally limited, especially in the field of finances because of their over-worked pace in college …show more content…
There have been billions of dollars spent on facilities for these so called amateur college athletes to compete. Tons of money is made by the colleges and the NCAA. The deep question is how should these college athletes benefit. Are they the student-athlete or the athlete-student ? It seems that in order to maintain the idea that education is first the NCAA promotes and keeps the false idea that the education of the student comes ahead of the athlete. This results into college athletes not being paid for what they do. They risk their possible careers because of possible injury while earning huge amounts of money for their college and not receiving any money themselves. College athletes do not have enough time to earn their desired degrees because of the time needed to be spent on training and playing. It is all about the money and they do not even help the college athletes learn financial awareness to keep their money if they do become a professional athlete. The overall big picture is that once paid more college athletes will stay in school, get a degree and earn enough money while in school to live comfortable. Paying college athletes is the morally right thing to do resulting in keeping the integrity of the colleges and the