Why College Athletes Should Be Paid

In 1910 the Intercollegiate Athletic Association of the United States, the original association for making rules to help govern college athletics, became the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA). This was the beginning of a dynasty. A few years later the NCAA began to organize national championships for various sports, with the most popular sport being basketball. Because of all the attention college sports started attracting the NCAA decided to allow universities to give out athletic scholarships to deserving athletes in 1957, which only further increasing the popularity of college sports. Since Basketball was the most popular sport in college at the time the NCAA decided to expanded the tournament in from eight teams to thirty-two in 1957. Eventually the attention of the tournament caught the

This continued until the most recent expansion in 2011. The NCAA college basketball national championship tournament now consists of 68 teams and has become the highest earning playoff in sports, with a reported revenue of $1.5 Billion on 2014 (Riper). Now the college basketball tournament, which is nicknamed March Madness, is one of the most popular sporting events in the world. According to a 2015 article in Time Magazine the top thirty college basketball teams reported a combined revenue of $500 million with around twenty players who are worth over a million dollars because of their contributions to their teams. All this success has raised the question of whether or not the athletes who participate in these tournaments throughout all of the various sports should be paid or otherwise compensated greater than they already are. In order to make an informed decision about paying college athletes, it is important to consider what the role of the athletes is in bringing in the money? Who benefits from the money? and what effect would being paid have on the