Essay Why Student Athletes Should Be Paid

College sport is one of North America’s largest sport industries, and with the help of the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) they are managing to generate a revenue of upwards of $100 million per season through Division I football programs alone. However, most of this income is going towards paying coaching staff, meanwhile the athletes who are a key component in the generation of this revenue never see a dime. As the years have gone on the college sport programs in the United States have grown and become much more intense and demanding with most Division I players practicing over 40 hours a week (Jacobs). Ultimately forcing the players to become more like full-time employees rather than the student-athletes the NCAA claims them to be. Student-athlete is a term that was coined by the NCAA, it implies that for all enrolled students who play a college level sport, being a student comes first, while being an athlete is treated as an extra-curricular. However, time and time again this is proven not to be true, with “the NCAA’s own 2011 survey [showing]…football and men’s basketball players identified themselves more strongly as athletes than students…[spending] more time on athletics than on their

For almost all student-athletes one of the largest problems is money, though the idea of their education being completely covered is presented it is not entirely true. The NCAA only allows for a scholarship to “include tuition fees, room, board, and books” (Johnson). This amount varies from school to school with the scholarship being “worth anywhere from $30,000 to $200,000, although the figures $20,000 to $100,000 over a four year period might be more accurate” (Johnson). However, this amount still does not cover the total cost of