College Athletes Should Get Paid

One of the biggest debates in sports right now is if collegiate athletes should be paid to play. March Madness, a college basketball tournament that goes on for a month in March grosses around 900 million dollars which go to the NCAA and the colleges that participate in it. However, the college players don’t make any of that money. Rather the college athletes have to work hard all season and don’t make any money off of their play. College athletes should get paid though there are economical, educational, social and legal reasons why they wouldn’t be able to get paid.

Firstly the players wouldn’t be able to get paid due to economical reasons. One economical reason is that even though university basketball and football programs seem to be making

One reason is that the top 3 college football teams in 2005, Notre Dame, Ohio State, and the University of Texas each generated more than 60 million dollars for the school that they didn’t even make any of. Only the people associated with the college and team are getting paid not even the people that actually play for the team. An additional reason is that many of these student-athletes are poor so they wouldn’t be able to get a job and make money while they’re in college because playing sports occupies 40 hours of their week. Which is the amount of hours somebody works a week at an average job. Therefore, many of these college students won’t even be able to eat and may be starving. An example of this is a former University of Connecticut basketball player starved some nights because he didn’t have any money to pay for food. Following this further, only 1 percent of student athletes go and play their sport as a career and make money off of it, and even less of these athletes make good money in the future. Thus they should be paid in college because that’s when most of them work for the team for free and won’t even end up making money off of their athletic skills (Lewis). Besides for that college athletes need to get paid because of the physical work they do during the season. These athletes work very hard the whole week under very harsh conditions and they don’t get paid. In addition to all the practice, games, training, and traveling the student athletes still need to work hard as students (Cooper). A final reason as to why they should get paid is due to the fact that the students don’t go to college for an education they go to play sports. It is shown that they go to college to play sports because the coaches of the teams are given incentives to convince the students to go to class. Thus showing that the students are only interested in their athletics and not their