Essay On Why College Athletes Should Be Paid

1295 Words6 Pages

Last year, the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) made over one billion dollars in revenue. How much of that went to the athletes? None. The athletes (who by the way are the NCAA’s main source of income) get nothing. That's not the case for every athlete, though, as the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) accused the University of Arizona of paying star basketball player Deandre Ayton one hundred thousand dollars to play basketball at their university. The NCAA is looking for a solution to stop these types of scandals, but they fail to look at it the right way. The only solution to the problem of college athletes getting paid in secret would be to simply alter the rules and allow fair compensation for them. For many significant …show more content…

That means for every 100 athletes, only three or four of them will actually “go pro”. Playing in college may be the only chance that athletes get to use their stance of being an athlete to earn money. While an athletic scholarship pays for some or all of their college expenses, it does not cover outside expenses that are part of their daily life, such as traveling home and doing laundry. Former basketball player Kareem Abdul Jabar says in his article ¨It’s time to Pay the Tab for America’s College Athletes” that during his time at the University of Los Angeles, he was “generally too poor to do anything but study, practice, and play.”(Abdul Jabbar) Student-athletes should be able to seek every opportunity to earn money, but they cannot because of the strict rules that have been put in place. Since these rules prevent student-athletes from having a job during the season like their fellow classmates, they should be able to make money in every legal way possible. In other words, it's time for being a college athlete to be recognized as a job, rather than simply an extracurricular