Amongst the controversy surrounding the NCAA’s recent crackdown on violations with regards to college programs compensating players and players accepting compensation from universities and outside sources, one question has understandably been brought up. It is a question that was bound to be asked sooner or later, and one without an obvious answer: should college athletes be paid? It is one of the biggest, if not the biggest, question that surrounds the world of college sports. The answer, quite simply put, is no. Allowing universities to pay students athletes to participate in sports would require a complete overhaul of the NCAA rule book. At this stage, too many questions need to be answered: how much would athletes get paid? Where
I would never pay more for my education so that someone else can be paid to play a sport, let alone an amateur sport that I do not have any interest in. Just imagine having your taxes raised in order for your local bar league softball teams to get paid for their ‘service’. Not even the most leftward-leaning liberal would agree to that nonsense, yet some people have proposed the same thing, (in principle), for college sports. In a world where a college degree is becoming more and more valuable, the cost is already becoming increasingly unaffordable; and that is without the additional pay that has been proposed by many. The worst part of it is that this proposal comes from the people that would be least affected by it: university officials, university boosters, etc. Another idea that has been proposed is to re-classify athletic roster spots as “jobs” and athletes as “employees” in the Federal Work Study program. In theory and on paper this idea sounds great, but in reality it is not as great as it seems. First off, employees in the FWS program are only allowed to work twenty hours a week. Every college athlete in every sport, male or female, spends much more than 20 hours on their respective sports each week. From practice, to film sessions, to weightlifting and conditioning, not to mention competition, that time adds up. What would the athletes “overtime” be considered? Would the