Essay Why College Athletes Should Be Paid

1453 Words6 Pages

In 2014, colleges that are in one of the top five wealthiest college conferences, also known as the “Power Five” (the top five most wealthiest college conferences) made 4.5 billion dollars in revenue from: ticket sales, monetary donations from alumni, and the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA). The NCAA distributes royalties, advertisements, sponsorships concessions, and sports camps. During 2014, the Power 5 conferences as a whole spent 4.4 billion dollars. This money is divvied out amongst staff salaries and benefits, coaches salaries and benefits, facilities, travel, recruiting, fundraising, equipment, medical and gameday costs. College players deserve to receive compensation for playing at the collegiate level. These athletes …show more content…

Rodney D. Fort explains that:
Many people have an aversion to paying college athletes for their services, but an examination of various principles of economics show that paying athletes makes sense and would make the college sports system more efficient in the way it distributes money. Players would receive more of the revenues they produce while pay would be cut for administrators and other employees in the athletic departments. (Fort 10)
Many sports followers wonder where the money would come from if athletes would get paid. They think college athletic departments barely break even but their is some confusion. Fort stated, “Universities allow athletic departments to keep all excess revenues on an updated basis during any given budget period. Thus, a department whose costs do not rise over budgeted amounts, but whose revenues are higher than expected, will appear to break even because they are allowed to spend the excess. So there can be plenty of revenue to be rearranged.” This shows that colleges athletic departments are spending unnecessary money on stuff to show that their revenue is not as high as it should be where if they would rearrange how they spend it they would be able to pay the deserving athletes that brought the money