Why College Athletes Should Be Paid

College athletics is a billion-dollar industry with revenue generated from hard-working, unpaid athletes. A college sport competition, such as football, basketball, and baseball, can be found on the television, radio, and Internet, almost every day. Intercollegiate athletics generate amazing ratings and revenue for both the media and universities due to their immense popularity in the United States. College athletics are big business and big money. In spite of this, the topic of paying college athletes is an extremely controversial topic. In fact, the “recent explosion of revenues flowing to NCAA member institutions and the relative pittance going to the primary input – the players…have created growing unease over the distribution of the [revenue]”
For instance, one school of thought is that there is an enormous disparity between the salary of college athletic coaches compared to any athletic scholarship received by an athlete. Therefore, Marx (2015) observes the following:
The four highest coaches’ salaries for 2012 were $5.2 million for the University of Texas’s Mack Brown, $4.2 million for Ohio State’s Urban Meyer, $3.8 million for the University of Iowa’s Kirk Ferentz, and $3.7 million for Louisiana State University’s Les Miles. It is rare for any head coach at a major football school to have a base salary of less than half a million. [Whereas] the compensation for the best college…players…is the traditional tuition and fees, room and board, and books. Never is there spending money. (p. 475)
This is a sentiment that is shared by numerous people when regarding whether college athletes should be
475). College sports is a full-time job, making it extremely difficult to concentrate on classes and grades. From a personal perspective, I have seen this in real-life due to my brother playing collegiate baseball. In a typical week, he spends a minimum of forty hours per week on required baseball activities, leaving insufficient time for studying and grades. In all honesty, according to Robert McCormick, an attorney for the National Labor Relations Board under President Jimmy Carter, “There are more demands put on these young [people] than any employee of the university…[they] are laboring under very strict and arduous conditions” (as cited in Cooper, 2011, p. 12). A similar sentiment was expressed by Willie Hicks Jr, the first black quarterback on the Boston College football team, when he declared, “There are similarities to [athletics] being a job, as I look back. There is a time allotment that is expected of you” (as cited in Cooper, 2011, p. 13). Thus, Marx offers emotional appeals based on the extensive amount of time spent to compete in college athletics, that invokes sympathy in the reader that college athletes deserve to be compensated properly. Undoubtedly, the warrant in the Marx essay is that due to the revenue earned by coaches and universities from college athletics and the time spent on the sport,