Student Athletes Should Be Paid

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To Pay or Not to Pay?
The term student-athlete was first crafted by Walter Byers in 1951, the first President of the NCAA. Student-athlete refers to a student enrolled full-time at an accredited four-year academic institution who also participates full time in collegiate athletics. The NCAA has stated time and time again that these students are not employees of the university they attend or of the NCAA and refuse to compensate them for their talent. My position on this matter is that student athletes should be given a form of monetary compensation for their athletic talent at the school. The majority of student-athletes on full-time scholarships are currently living below the federal poverty line; an athlete's chance of being compensated after …show more content…

Last year the NCAA March Madness tournament alone generated $989 million, almost a billion dollars just from the tournament. Division I football programs generated $1 billion dollars last year while basketball programs generated $300 million (USA Today). The NCAA likes to throw out the statistic that only fourteen schools reported a profit last year from their athletic programs, but this number is misleading according to USA Today economists. Most schools will reshuffle their budgets to make it appears as though they are not generating a larger amount of profit. However, schools very often will find themselves with millions of dollars in generated revenue and will simply spend it either on coaches salaries or updating sports facilities to look like luxury spas. Thanks to some clever budgeting a school can appear to only generate a small profit each year when in reality they are bringing in hundreds of millions of dollars. Say for example we decided to pay student athletes $5,000 a year, the NCAA argues that they do not have the money to cover such a cost so therefore it is impossible. If you were to pay all 460,000 athletes $5,000 a year it would only come out to be 4% of the total budget for the NCAA and the universities (Forbes). That does not include jersey sales or advertisements for the students. While the NCAA wants people to believe it cannot afford to pay all of its athletes, the reality is that not only could they afford to pay, but they could do so with hundreds of millions to

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