Summary: Student Athletes Should Get Paid

In 2013 Colleges earned a generated revenue of $48.2 million from their football programs alone (Sanderson and Siegried). Colleges are generating more than enough money from just their athletics to pay their players. In 2011 the NCAA reached a 14 year deal with CBS Sports worth $10.8 billion. Part of the deal makes all games in the NCAA division one tournament to be shown on four channels. Money is not the issue. Colleges receive hundreds of millions of dollars from their sports teams each year. Student athletes should be getting paid.

Where is the money these athletic programs are earning going? There are many different categories in which a college program needs to put their money in order to create the best profit they can for the next

year and keep their team playing at the highest level possible. One of these categories would be coaching. College basketball coaches and football coaches can make millions of dollars from their coaching jobs and it all depends on how the team does during the year in which the coach is coaching. The more wins the coach gets, the better he is payed. Among head football coaches, Alabama’s Nick Saban earns over $7 million per
year and Ohio State’s Urban Meyer has a base salary of $4.6 million per year, not
counting numerous incentive clauses. Among head basketball coaches, Duke’s
Mike Krzyzewski earns $9.7 million per year and Kentucky’s John Calipari is above $7 million per year. The median head football coach among the 126  Football Bowl Subdivision institutions earned $1.9 million in 2013; the comparable head basket-ball coach’s salary was $1.2 million.
(Sanderson andSiegried)
Coaches are highly paid based on how the student athlete performs. If a coach messes up he or her might lose their job but still walk away with the money they had already earned,
if a student athlete messes up they might get benched and lose their chance at making the pros before earning any money at all. The student athletes are under a lot more pressure than what coaches are under because if a player does something wrong the coach can just switch that player out for a new one.
These student athletes watch as their coaches are being payed millions of dollars while the players do all the work on the field and earn nothing but a scholarship. What people don’t realize is that without the student athletes the coaches would not have their jobs in the first place. The reason these schools are able to pay their coaches such high wages is because of how the student athletes perform during the season. The student athletes are bringing in the fans, the publicity, the TV deals, and most importantly the student athletes are bringing their colleges money, which the student athletes don’t see a penny of. “All television revenue, ticket and jersey sales, likeness promotions and other sources of income go to the NCAA, the schools, the coaches, the event staffs and everyone else involved in the business—except for the athletes creating the value” (Johnson and StudentNation).
Student athletes play in college sports and help their colleges create millions of dollars in return for a free scholarship. Johnson and StudentNation stated that “the NCAA’s exploitative marketing comes in exchange for a scholarship incidental to the industry, and it requires far more time spent playing a major sport than studying for classes”. Student athletes don't have nearly as much time to focus on their education as any normal student would because these student athletes are having to put up to sixty hours of their time into their athletics. Student athletes are practicing just as much if not more than someone would at a part-time job, yet the NCAA treats it more like a PE class than anything. This causes the student not to be focused on his or her studies but only on their sport.
In 2005 the NBA and NCAA set up a rule that required students to wait one year before entering the NBA draft.

This was to get ore kids to go to college which is a good thing for the NCAA but is not very beneficial for a great basketball player who doesn't want to waste time in college when he could go straight to the pros and make money right away.

One issue with this rule is that it creates risk for the athlete. If the athlete goes straight into the NBA draft and is drafted the player is an instant millionaire. When a player is forced to sit out one year before going pro it not only takes away one full year of pay but also creates a risk of injury. If an injury occurs then his chances of making it into the NBA has slimmed down tremendously. This is because NBA teams don’t want to take a risk drafting an injured player.

College athletes don’t want to go to college if they are already good enough to go pro because of the risk that they are taking. If student athletes were getting paid they likely wouldn't be so opposed to having to go to college for one or maybe even four

years.
Getting paid to play in college can make it easier to stay in school when a player’s draft stock can be improved, experience at the collegiate level enhanced and education on and off the field furthered.

It might lead some players to stick around and work on a degree, their skills or maturity. (Keolanui)  One of the main reasons student athletes who could go pro don’t stay for four years is because when they are in college they are living off of basically nothing. If you add money which they deserve into the equation, it might make them want stay for a couple more years and maybe even wait to go pro so that they can earn their degree. There is a similar rule in the NFL. The NFL has a rule that you must be three years out of high school to enter the NFL draft. This creates even bigger issues for the student athletes. Football being a more physical sport makes the risk even larger for the student athlete. “They work long hours, report to an unusually demanding boss and risk significant bodily harm in bringing glory to their institutions. And yet the result of all this is not a paycheck, but a bill” (“At Risk”).

Most people don’t realize that when a student athlete has a season ending injury, they have to pay for the expenses. Those expenses are extremely hard to pay off when the athlete has no source of income because he or she has no time to get a job. This would be confusing to a student athlete who is helping to bring in their school millions of dollars per year

and the school won’t even help with and injury that happened while the athlete was playing their sport.
These players don't realize that some of the things they are taught in college are things that will help them in the long run. Some of these players are coming out of places were money is tight and they are basically living in poverty. When some of these players leave college early to go to the pros without any idea of how to take care of the extreme amounts of money they will be earning it can end up bad.
“An Ex-NBA player named Adonal Foyle says that almost none of us come from wealthy families,” Foyle writes. “The vast majority of us do not even come from middle-class families. Instead, we sign multimillion-dollar contracts as ­20-year-  olds with little or no financial knowledge”(Callahan). Many players are going into the pros with little to no idea of how to take care of money because they are leaving college early. They leave college early because they think of the pros as being the only way out of their situation and many also leave for the pros so that they can start helping their family as well. Many athletes that enter the pros once they get in don't know what to do with their money because they have never had so much of it so they just start to spend it. Some of these players after their time is done in the pros end up going bankrupt. If these players were being paid during college it might give them enough motivation to stay in college and mature more before going into the pros. If this were to happen more of these athletes would know how to handle their money better that what they would only spending one year in college rather than four
So why would a student athlete want to stay in college if he or she could just go straight to the pros and start earning money right away? The answer is simple, they would if they were allowed too. Professional sports gives the athlete one way to get into the pros without taking years off from their sport and that’s college athletics.
Colleges are earning millions of dollars from the two major sports being football and basketball. These students are not getting one dime of this money. The NCAA will tell anyone who brings up this issue that the money isn't there and that there is not enough money to pay these athletes, but each year see these schools make more and more money. Where is this money that these athletic programs are making going?
David Berry says “It’s pretty clear that they would be able to. I don’t see any reason that they wouldn’t be able to, in fact” (Strachan). The reason the NCAA is saying otherwise is because the college is spending the money they make off athletics just as fast as their making it.