The article titled “Should College Athletes Be Paid?” is focused on the exploration of a rather popular contemporary issue – the status of the modern college athletes. The article describes a typical case of a college football game with tens of thousands of spectators, star athletes, and massive popularity.
In the case it is mentioned that the university of a star athlete receives a revenue that estimates approximately one hundred thousand dollars a year, at the same time, the athlete’s annual scholarship accounts for ten thousand dollars only (Tucker 309). According to the rules of NCAA, college athletes are not considered to be employees and cannot be paid for what they do even though they are responsible for huge incomes of their universities and NCAA itself (Tucker 309).
The regulations created by NCAA are the basis for the monopsony established by the universities in order to attract the high performing athletes. To get the best players, colleges and universities provide them with numerous illegal benefits such as trips, cars, or money (Tucker 309). Acquiring the high-performers among athletes increases the universities’ popularity, grants them TV appearances, participation in the prestigious tournaments, and even bigger revenues.
The illegal actions of the monopsony of universities disobeying the rules of NCAA benefit the athletes whose performance finally gets rewarded in a more appropriate way, yet it leads to the dissatisfaction of the institutions that follow the rules of NCAA, tend to underachieve in the field of sports and lose popularity compared to the cheating institutions. In order to solve this problem an official monetary reward needs to be provided for the college athletes. Yet, it is undecided which side should provide the payments – NCAA or the universities.
The popularity of college sports is massive in the United States today. Even though NCAA keeps emphasizing that college athletes are, primarily, students, the practical approach shows that they also are rather busy employees. First of all, high-achieving college athletes need to keep training for many hours a day to stay in good shape and maintain good results.
This way, the average week of a college athlete includes around forty three hours of trainings, which basically matches the time an average American employee spends at the workplace weekly. Therefore, stating that college athletes are primarily students is incorrect. Besides, it is worth mentioning that frequent tournaments and exhausting trainings make the athletes skip classes and dedicate to sports the time that other students spend studying.
The parties that benefit from college sports are the universities and NCAA. Coaches of the university sports teams have rather high salaries and the university sports programs account for hundreds of dollars of revenue. Star teams and athletes become the symbols of the universities and promote them on TV, in the Internet, and in the newspapers. Yet, none of these revenues can be compared to what NCAA makes.
The income of the officially non-profit NCAA estimates around six billion dollars per year. This is why it would be reasonable if both of the benefiting parties contributed to the payments for the college athletes. Of course, not all of the teams and athletes are high-performers.
Moreover, there are sports that are not as popular as football and basketball, so a flexible, yet fair, system of rewards should be established. College athletes should not be paid large sums of money, but a significant addition to their scholarship would be a great way of compensation.
Works Cited
Tucker, Irvin. Economics for Today. 8th ed. 2014. Boston: Cengage Learning. Print.