The Price to Pay College Athletes

As colleges nationwide get even more expensive, scholarships and other financial aid are crucial for students.  Many college athletes are rewarded with athletic scholarships, but many feel it’s not enough for them, they want a paycheck.  Paying college athletes can cause extreme problems in the NCAA community that we don’t want to bring out.   As great as it sounds to an athlete to get paid, the downside of this can be catastrophic and lead to many issues amongst the NCAA.

People go to college to get an education; playing a sport and getting a scholarship is just an extra bonus to help knock down the cost of tuition.  If we pay college athletes, we are prioritizing athletics over education which is not the case when going to college, but it is the case when going straight from high school to the big leagues.  Division 1 commit to Bucknell for track and field, Jared Hess, feels the same way, “Sure, getting paid for my sport sounds great, but I also know that that’s a ton of money that will probably just get added to my tuition,” Hess said.  On the contrary, the current athlete for Goucher University, Steven Silva, thinks college athletes should get paid, “College tuition is crazy nowadays, we all could use that extra money,” Silva says.

Aside from the other arguments over the fact that it is right or wrong, we need to take a look at the economical side of this.  Data from the NCAA show that only 14 universities are profiting right now which means that only those 14 schools could afford to pay their athletes without going into debt.  If only those universities decided to pay their athletes, then that would cause an uproar among the other athletes who aren’t getting paid.  Another big issue is that there is no real plan that anyone has come up with detailing how they decide which athletes get paid if not all of them, how much they get paid if certain people get paid more than others, how the payments will come in (yearly, monthly, weekly).  All of these are big concerns for the people that will oversee putting this whole movement into action.