College Athletes Should Be Paid

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“Money is flooding into athletic departments and the athletes benefit in many ways, but do these athletes deserve to be paid for what they do?” (Walch & Marshall, 2016). This is the question that has been the main focal point of the NCAA for the last decade. Proposers state that the athletes are the ones that bring in the money, and they also point out that college athletes need money for essentials such as food. Opposers counter with the fact that colleges already compensate their athletes through scholarships. They also state that scholarships should be enough since colleges and universities are schools, and the main focus at a school should be education. This topic has created an uproar within the college sports community. While both sides …show more content…

This debate has the entire community in an uproar. Starting in highschool, and in some cases even sooner, the athlete frequently plays for one reason, the love of the game. According to Wallsten, Nteta, & McCarthy, “One of the biggest reasons fans like college sports is that they believe the athletes are really students who play for a love of the sport” (2015). However, not all high school athletes can go on to play a sport they love. Only one percent of the seven milion that play high school sports will receive a full ride to a Division I college (National Center for Supercomputing Applications [NCSA], 2017, p. 1). The athletes that do not receive full scholarships still have many programs to help them pay for their college.Ackerman and Scott state: “The 170,000 athletes who play Division I sports are the beneficiaries of the nation’s second largest college financial aid program, second only to the GI Bill” (2017, p. 1). These scholarships help college athletes immensely. In fact, 15 percent of college athletes say they would not even be in college if it were not for the scholarships they received for playing sports (Williams, 2017, p. 2). Studies also show that a higher percentage of Division I athletes graduates than their fellow students. “67% of all Division I athletes will go on to become college graduates, a slightly higher graduation rate than that of their fellow students who do not play on NCAA teams” (Ackerman & Scott, 2016, p.2). This shows that college athletes deserve to be compensated; however, the debate is how to compensate

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