Pros And Cons Of Paying College Athletes

The Ongoing Debate

In 2019, the NCAA pulled in around 1.2 billion dollars in revenue, and none of that went to the players. However, there is a new option for collegiate athletes: NIL deals. As more collegiate players take advantage of the newly available NIL (name, image and likeness) deals, more people are calling for the removal of all NCAA bans on paying college athletes. Various people across the country have been debating over athletes getting paid by their colleges for decades, and with NIL deals being approved, the debate is currently raging. Paying college athletes would have a dramatic impact on all university sports and could do more bad than good. Even though there are millions of dollars being made of them, college athletes should

The average student pays 100,000 dollars to go college for 4 years, but college athletes who receive scholarships pay much less or don’t have to pay at all. Bleacher Report, a well-known sports company, emphasizes that at “{Arizona State University}, in-state athletes are ‘paid’ $26.36 an hour, while out-of-state athletes are ‘paid’ $46.77 an hour” (Boor). Yes, college athletes may not work jobs while playing, but most college students work jobs to pay their tuition, which college athletes do not have to worry about. Athletes are paid with their scholarships much more than they could get at any low-level, part-time job most college students work at. Many college athletes graduate from top-level colleges without a trace of debt. Thousands of students walk out of the same college with the same degree as an athlete but are stuck with tens of thousands of dollars in debt they have to pay throughout the rest of their lives. In the article “Paying College Athletes: Overview” Tracy Dilacio wrote that “they are often compensated for their participation with full scholarships to competitive—and often very expensive—colleges and universities”. Student-Athletes, while not getting paid cash in a normal sense, are getting paid by their colleges as scholarships. Collegiate athletes do not need to be paid more than what they are, which is a free, high-level

Most of the money would go to high-attention sports, like men’s basketball and football.ProCon.org, a well-known supply of information on several topics, mentioned in “Paying College Athletes-Top 3 pros and Cons’’ that “the remaining scholarships would be distributed to top football and men’s basketball players because those two sports bring in the most revenue”. Universities would struggle to pay everyone, as the revenue brought in would be unequally distributed. This would be unfair to those athletes in the smaller programs because they have worked just as hard to be where they are. Another problem is the lack of funding from the smaller programs to pay the athletes. US News Digital Weekly revealed in “Should College Student-Athletes Be Paid?” that “The truth is that only a fraction of the programs is profitable while most operate at a cost to the institution” (Mitchell). The only programs that the universities could afford to give more money to are the large programs, which would leave their smaller programs out to dry. Overall, if college athletes were paid, some players would benefit, but most would