Pay for Play

College Athletes: Pay for Play? Ever since the National Collegiate Athletic Association was formed in 1905, their role in regulating intercollegiate athletics has involved many different tasks. These tasks include making athletics safe in order to prevent injury, marketing athletic events, regulating and changing rules in order to make college sports more fun for the fans, and enforcing the key principle of college sports: amateurism. Amateurism in college athletics means that athletes are unpaid. As a result, the NCAA has had to deal with deciding how to handle issuing and assigning monetary value of scholarships and grants. However, the NCAA has not had to manage the debate over college athletes getting paid to play. In a day where more and more college athletes are leaving college early to enter the professional leagues it is time to ask a question: Should division-I college athletes get paid? The question is based on the assumption that there is a place for college athletics within a university. The NCAA should be looked at economically because the universities within it generate profits through their athletic departments and operate as businesses by assessing costs, revenues, etc. With that assumption established, because of the market inefficiency and exploitative characteristics of the NCAA, division-I college athletes should get paid in a free-market environment. Division-I college athletes recognize that they are exploited and receiving a scholarship worth less than their market value, so they have no incentive to not cheat and accept illegal payments. First of all, the NCAA market structure is inefficient, and it results in exploiting its athletes. The NCAA exploits its athletes because it works as a buying cartel. A buying cartel takes advantage of its suppliers by getting rid of competition from other buyers through eliminating the negotiating or bidding process. The result of having no bidding process is fixed wages. The NCAA works