Why Should College Athletes Be Paid?

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The National Collegiate Athletic Association also know as the NCAA is a multi-billion dollar business that controls just about everything in college sports. A question asked over and over again when talking about college sports is, where does that money go that the NCAA makes from games and merchandise? According to the NCAA, the money they make goes into the scholarships the school 's offers, stadium upgrades, gear the athletes have, and getting the best coaches to get them into the professional league. Well, are scholarships and big name Coaches enough for the athletes? If you ask the NCAA this is the best they can do and every year they try to increase the amount of scholarships a school is able to offer and increase the amount of money …show more content…
Evidently, the courts feel that the NCAA is looking out for the athletes and the rules already in place justify why they cannot be paid. What the NCAA constantly brings up is the money they receive does not go into their pockets but back into the schools and programs the NCAA has to offer. Ways the NCAA uses the money is by “increasing the amount of money in scholarships offered” and by “upgrading and refurbishing equipment and facilities” (Steele 522-523). I feel this is a good thing the NCAA is doing but for many college athletes the money they get in grants and scholarships is not enough and they have to get a job. Having to get a job takes away from time they could be out practicing with the team and working on class projects/assignments. The third argument for not paying college athletes according to, Andre Zimbalist, an economist, and writer of “Paying College Athletes: Take Two”, state “not all college sports make profitable money that it is a small percent of sports programs and schools that do.” What a lot of people don’t get is not all the schools make …show more content…
Now, even though some schools don’t make the money needed to pay athletes, a salary cap for athletes at big money maker schools could work. Joe Nocera, an American business journalist and writer of “A Way to Start Paying College Athletes”, proposes the idea of a salary cap like the NBA and NFL in how much they have and can spend on players. Nocera breaks it down into how much each player should make, he states, “In basketball, the cap would be $650,000. In football, it would be $3 million.” Now these numbers could change but implementing a salary cap could work. It would give a team the money needed to divide among the players based on playing time and how valuable they are to the team. The scholarships would be used for players that are useful to the team but not as much as the paid players. Now this could be hard for players to understand or like but what it would do is create the mindset in the players that they need to always give one hundred percent in practice and games to hopefully get a paycheck. Also what would be put into place is that the players receiving money need to have a minimum grade point average to keep the money and if they cannot keep grades up, the salary is taken away till grades are better. Something that some colleges are doing but not all are giving the athletes a stipend. According to Chris Isidore, a senior writer for CNN Money and writer of

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