College Athletes Should Be Paid

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Pages: 9

College athletics, governed by the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) at their highest level, are a multi-billion dollar business. The athletic directors get paid, the conference commissioners get paid and the coaches get paid. In fact, according to a Sports Illustrated article, in 40 of the 50 states, the highest paid public official is a men’s football or basketball coach at a state university (Rosenberg). So why, if these individuals earn as much as their professional counterparts, are we not paying the college athletes who actually participate in these sports? The NCAA has tried to sell the masses on the integrity and pride a student-athlete competes with, due to their status as an amateur. All of this hides the fact that these athletes have to live below the poverty line because their “full-ride” scholarships do not actually pay for everything. College athletes are not just student-athletes, but should also be …show more content…
Being a student-athlete in today’s college athletics has been compared, by Duke University Professor Charles Clotfield, “to a modern-day form of indentured servitude,” (qtd. in Barbash). The average men’s division one football player spends over forty-three hours per week in some sort of football-related activity, while an average men’s division one basketball player spends thirty-nine hours per week in basketball-related activities (9). These numbers are only in relation to the number of hours the student-athlete is working on or playing his sport. This amount of time does not include the multiple hours spent in class, studying or participating in other school-related events. Considering that the average American works an average of 40 hours a week, the fact that these student-athletes are spending that much time or more on just being an athlete is alarming. This fact alone should make these young men not student-athletes, but employed