Should College Athletes Be Paid Essay Sample

Could you imagine a multi-billion dollar company that doesn’t pay its employees, that would be crazy wouldn’t it? Well, that’s how college sports in America work. Seven College stadiums in America seat over 100,000 people. As I’m sure you're aware, if college stadiums can host over one hundred thousand people, then they are going to be making an absolute fortune each week. To have even the smallest chance of becoming a professional athlete in America, going to college is a very useful stepping stone to get you there, however this dream for many each year is shattered when their college career ends and they are still to make any money from their commitments.

The dedication college players show whilst making no money is truly commendable. It seems unfair that whilst the college coaches in America can earn millions of dollars from their player’s hard work, the players themselves don’t even get a fraction of the money. After all, coaches are nothing without the players. A Sportsnaut article showed that the top-earning college coaches all make well over 5 million dollars a year, with the top earner, Nick Aban, making a substantial amount of 8.4 million dollars per year. Even if players were to make a fragment of the coaches’ large salary, it would still go a long way towards ensuring that they have money saved up to buy weekly groceries and clothes. There is plenty of money in college sports, an article by Business Insider showed that the NCAA made more than $1 billion in revenue during the school year of 2016-17. This shows that there is more than enough money to pay athletes and the fact the players don’t get paid allows their coaches to make an absurd amount of money instead of them.

If you think working a full-time job is hard enough, try working a full-time job where you don’t get paid. Sadly, that is the tough reality for many hard-working athletes across the country. An experienced American education journalist called Mark Drozdowski said, “Participating in intercollegiate athletics constitutes a full-time job.” This is backed up by an NCAA survey in 2017, which revealed that Division One athletes dedicate an average of 35 hours per week to their sport during the season. This many hours worth of gym work, practice, game analysis, and conditioning is a vast amount of time to dedicate to a sport that you will never receive a paycheck for. Throughout the week these athletes are making huge sacrifices with schoolwork, social lives and physical and mental well-being to ensure that they are in the best shape to win games, and in the end not making even a single drop of money from their efforts. A recent lawsuit against the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill and the NCAA said that the 40 hours worth of practice was far too much and left far too little time to keep up with academic commitments. This lawsuit was filed by two former UNC students, they claimed that they were deprived of a “meaningful education” due to their commitments to the football team. This shows that athletes find it hard to balance good education with sports and that if they were at least getting paid it would make their academic sacrifices more worthwhile.

Working part-time during college is very common among students but student-athletes simply do not have enough hours in the week to work alongside their training. Working part-time can be so important to buy new clothes, food, and rent, but when you are training for up to 5 hours a day it could be very hard to work part-time as well. New research shows that 59% of students are now working during their time in college which goes to show the opportunity that athletes miss out on because of their free labor as athletes. Many describe college sports as being a “full-time job” and, when you combine training and many assignments, the idea of getting a job for these athletes is just absurd. An article by Global Sports Matter said that the 40 hours college sports teams spend training “is equivalent to a full-time job”, and I think we all know that having a part-time job on top of this would not be at all possible. The addition of pay into the college sports scheme could improve many athletes' lives as they would no longer feel guilty for not being able to work during their time in college. 

College athletes are undoubtedly in incredibly lucky positions to be on scholarships with the ability to use top-class facilities and the best coaches from around the country, but the end of their time in college will mark the end of their sports career for many each year. The NCAA's official website published an article that shows only 2% of aspiring athletes will ever go on to be professional athletes. This means that of the 460,000 athletes only 9,200 will make it as a professional. When the NCAA ad revenue alone is $11 billion, it really does beg the question of why these talented young workers don’t get paid even the slightest fraction of money as there is more than enough money to pay the hard-working athletes. Only 78% of college football players graduate, and many don’t graduate because they have a hard time balancing their academic studies with their full-time commitments to their sport. This means that athletes should be getting paid because of the small number of them that will ever become professional and because there are so many missing out on a proper education as well which will restrict their earnings and opportunities in the future.

In conclusion, it is completely unreasonable that college athletes are not getting paid especially with the amount of money in the college sports industry. Moreover, for the vast majority of hopeful athletes, their career ends after college and they will never have the opportunity to make any money from their sport.