Why Do Student Athletes Get Paid?

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Since it’s founding over a century ago, the NCAA has developed from a minute form of extra-curricular involvement offered to students, to a dominant entertainment industry nationwide. The growing success of this program has promoted a genuinely competitive nature, deteriorating the previous category of “amateurism”. Being that it has become such a popular program, the demand for student-athlete dedication has become exuberant. The development has established sports as the central focus for student-athletes as practices and competitions amount to 40+ hour workweeks for them. Such a heavy involvement in addition to school prevents the student-athletes from being able to work, leaving them unable to form an income to afford living expenses that scholarships cannot cover. This creates a life of poverty for these student-athletes and is incredibly unfair when observing the high salaries of other faculty members such as coaches. In order to solve this problem, the NCAA must logically distribute its wealth by offering a stipend to …show more content…

Andrew Merkle resembles this as he argues that student-athletes already have “a leg up on the majority of his or her classmates” because they will be graduating with a degree debt-free (Merkle). This standpoint provides a legitimate comparison, but fails to recognize multiple key aspects. Many non-athletes earn academic scholarships that allow them to also graduate debt-free just as athletic scholarships do, but the stipulations of these scholarships differ drastically. Academic scholarships do not require the demanding extra-curricular involvement that athletic scholarships do, therefore the opportunity to work part-time to cover living expenses if needed is present. The two types of scholarships were both earned and offer the same monetary benefits, but athletic scholarships are much more binding for the