Why Should College Athletes Be Paid

To Pay or Not to Pay
To pay or not to pay, that is the question that colleges are facing. College athletes are at college for an education, which is being lost fully paid for, therefore they should not be paid a salary on top of it. Problems arise when colleges discuss paying athletes. First they don't have enough money, the athletes are first and foremost students, and it would lead to unfair circumstances. Even though tuition and various college prices are high, colleges are in debt. Colleges are meant for furthering education, but athletics also play a big role in college. In a perfect world colleges, and everyone, would have surplus amount of money. Since that is not the fact, schools don’t have unlimited amounts of money and face financial
This proves that colleges don’t have enough revenue to pay sport players. Athletic departments would have to produce the funds, which they are not capable of. Paying college athletes would lead to a major problem for low revenue producing schools. Programs that are unprofitable would fall behind in trying to get quality players, unless they want to increase their deficit spending. The deficit spending could lead to devastating effects on the revenue produced by the colleges (Sanderson and Siegfried122). This would be a problem because colleges that are already in debt would try and keep up. By paying more and more the colleges would create a larger debt. Meaning in the future those colleges may be too far in debt to ever be able to pay it off. Instead there should be a more efficient way to provide compensation to players without creating more debt. It is also not just the low revenue producing schools that could face an increase in debt. Even high revenue producing colleges could face bankruptcy if the zero-sum competitive recruiting process is implemented (Sanderson and Siegfried 130). By paying athletes, schools would in return be having a competition to see who could get the best players while having the least amount of debt. Schools
They are college students who are a part of a sports team, something they chose. By paying athletes they turn into employees. “Among paying programs, academic expectations will diminish- if not disappear- as athletes morph into full-time W-2 employees and part-time (at most) students” (Magee). If the students are being paid they will more than likely be forced to spend more time with their sport. Therefore, the time they would spend on academics would diminish. Which is a problem because college athletes already undertake a simplified course load. These classes are called paper classes which only involve writing one paper at the end of the semester (Neuhauser). Academics are clearly not the priority for most college athletes already. By paying them colleges would expect even less work. Athletes choose to participate in their sport while in college. Although being a college athlete is comparable to having a full time job, that is what student-athletes sign up for (Widener). If students feel as though the course load is too much they should simply stop playing the sport. School and academics should be the main focus for student athletes. The only solution to insuring the fact that athletics come first is to separate them. If students go to college, academics should be the priority. Paying the athletes would only push the idea of students being employees rather than students.