Essay On Why College Athletes Should Not Be Paid

Did you know that the NCAA supplies college student-athletes with over 3.6 billion dollars worth of scholarships each year? Despite this equitable form of compensation for playing a sport of their desire, so many people nationally believe these athletes should be paid a yearly salary! In this essay, reasons will be given to you as to why these colleges should not pay their athletes. There are so many facts and statistics in which all couldn’t be included, but there is still a plethora of information backing these athletes not being paid. College student-athletes should not be paid a salary by their colleges because they do not bring in all the money and attention as it’s perceived, they can already make money off of their name, image, and likeness

Players, as well already earn money off of their NIL (Name, Image, Likeness). On top of the NIL earnings, they can sign with agents and school boosters, adding to the money they can make anyway, without salaries (Should). Because they can make money in this way, the colleges shouldn’t be liable for paying the big-name athletes even more (Should). The NCAA already provides 3.6 billion dollars worth of scholarships to over 180,000 athletes. This results in roughly 20,000 dollars to each student receiving a scholarship while the average total cost to attend college is only 18,000 dollars (Should). More than half of student-athletes already get financial aid as well, and a good majority of them don’t even need it. If athletes began receiving salaries on top of what they already get, the regular price of college tuition could skyrocket (Wood). In the end, these student-athletes already are gaining tens of thousands of dollars during their college careers along with having the chance at getting a college education. This sounds like plenty enough of earning opportunities for a

These athletes are awarded a cheap or sometimes close to a free opportunity to gain this education, so they should take advantage of it. If athletes began being paid salaries, schools with more money and more payment opportunities would strongly affect where the big-name athletes would go (Wood). I’ll even give an example of this from a different source. Suppose an athlete was choosing a school for their sport and they were between North Carolina or Harvard. An everyday athlete would choose North Carolina in a heartbeat. But suppose players were getting paid salaries and Harvard offered more money. This could completely change the athlete’s path of where they want to go to college all because of money (Essay). The highest likelihood to go pro in any college sport is that of baseball at about 10%. A majority of this 10% won’t even make it to the MLB where the real earning is done. The chances of earning a degree are much higher and set them up for a great future. Focusing on the schooling part more than trying to earn money in college would be much more beneficial for these student-athletes (Should). Of all undergraduate students, athletes receiving some kind of compensation (scholarships, financial aid, etcetera) graduated with a degree 5% of the time more than non-athletes. This shows that without having to worry about any kind of money students are in a better environment to succeed and set themselves up for