Is a Free Education Enough? For years, division I players have been pouring their hearts out day after day, week after week, to protect the pride and tradition of the university. For the athletes hard work they receive free schooling and that is it. According to NCAA rules, Section 2 Title V “it is a violation of NCAA rules for athletes to accept money or gifts while intending to remain eligible.” A college athlete doesn’t have time for a job, all their free time is spent either at practice or studying, so how do they get money for their personal use? College athletes are suppose to be playing for the love of the game but when you are in division I it is more or less a business, and their job is to make money for the university. The NCAA is a billion dollar business and the workers (the athletes) are not seeing one dollar of this. As much money as the NCAA and universities are making off college athletes I believe they should give some to the players after all there would be no money to be made if it wasn’t for the players. Some athletes come from tough backgrounds and are living below the poverty level, and they need some sort of income. A college athlete receives with their scholarship room and board but some student athletes don’t have enough money to pay for their laundry. So what should be done about this? One solution is to pay the players. I am not saying we should pay them millions of dollars like players receive in professional leagues but a smaller amount. Maybe something like $200 to $300 dollars a month, this would be money that they could spend on their phone bill, laundry, transportation ect. Compared to how much money the players make for their university this amount would be chump change. Student athletes are normal people like everyone else when it comes to their personal needs and it takes money to get these needs. Something that has been coming up a lot lately and has been around ever sense the NCAA started is players getting paid by booster. There has been cases where boosters will pay player thousands of dollars or will get some really nice gifts from people they don’t even know. This is very much against the rules of the NCAA like I mentioned earlier. The punishment of this can result in the player being kicked out of school and also the university getting in serious trouble. One case that has occurred in the last year was a top recruit who was getting recruited by several universities named Cameron Newton. Newton quarterback who was coming from a junior college in Texas was offered $200,000 by the University of Mississippi State to play for them. Newton did not attended Mississippi State but instead went to Auburn University. If a university can afford to spend this kind of money on a player who they are not even for sure is going to be good that shows how much money the program is earning. Last year CBS paid the NCAA $72 million just so they could televise the NCAA men’s basketball tournament in March. Since 1965 the NCAA has increased its revenue by 8000%. The percentage of money that the student athletes have received has not increased at all. The NCAA is like any business it has different positions from the owner, managers and employees. The owners are the ones with the money, the managers (coaches) run the business how it should be ran and the employees are the ones who do the hard work. I do not know of a business where the owner and the managers get all the money and the employees don’t receive any. An ESPN analyst Jalen Rose has a good point on why we should not pay student athletes.
A study published this week by USA Today places the value of an athletic scholarship at somewhere between $110,000 and $119,000 per year. This figure includes the cost of such things as access to private coaching and state-of-the-art training facilities and medical care as well as free education, meal stipends and other benefits.
At the very least, one could argue this is a fair trade of services. The