Should College Athletes be Paid? Every year I watch the March Madness tournament, where 68 Division I college basketball teams in the NCAA, will compete for a national championship. And every year, it seems like the same argument emerges: Should student-athletes be paid? My immediate reaction was “No way! They get a free education.” These athletes go to very high profile and expensive schools to play a game. For them to get paid, I thought, was very greedy. Athletes are already so privileged along with all of the special treatment they receive But, when I really thought about it, I was making a lot of assumptions and I knew almost nothing aside from what I saw on TV. In the 2015-2016 season alone, college athletics generated $12 billion in revenue. This money is earned from major TV network deals, marketing licenses, ticket sales, student fees, and merchandise vendors. Interestingly, advertisement earnings from the March Madness tournament surpassed that of the the …show more content…
He told Complex Sports: "In any facet of college life, only one class of people have any financial restriction on them at all and that’s athletes. So the idea that it's based on education is a lie. No other student is told what they can and cannot make, and if it affects their education, or scholarship, or anything” (Peebles).
Out of all of those billions of dollars, it seems outrageous to me that athletes can not turn a single profit especially when there are some that are going hungry or homeless. Yes, they are receiving a free education, but how could one possibly take advantage of this when the average college athlete is spending 40-50 hours a week in training, practice or at a game? To me, the notion that they are being given an education as payment seems selfish. With that logic, it seems like the colleges are really just paying