Kareem Abdul Jabbar once said “despite the hours I put in everyday, 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.” Let that sink in a little. Kareem Abdul Jabbar, the first pick in the 1969 draft, an NBA legend, and a member of the Hall of Fame, was too broke to rub two pennies together in college. College athletes need to be able to get paid for what they do, and this is a problem that needs to be fixed. Here are a few reason why.
The first reason why this needs to be fixed is that 86% of the high school athletes that receive a college scholarship live below the poverty line. If you think
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Most of these kids are super happy to get a scholarship and an opportunity to play the game they love at a collegiate level. The average scholarship is anywhere between $5,548 - $14,270. That is nice, but will most likely only cover a portion of the college expenses. Now, assume that instead of going to college the athlete went to work as a professional athlete. It is well known that only a small percentage of college athletes make it to the pros, so imagine a league similar to the NCAA but one that pays players, though not as much as a pro player, and the player does not have school. Fair market value for a pro football and pro basketball players are in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. There is a huge difference between a $100,000 salary and a $10,000 scholarship. The student athletes spend at least 30 hours a week doing what the professional athletes do, but just do not get paid. The colleges make all the money from their hard work and that is