Why College Athletes Should Get Compensation Imagine spending hours and hours a week working as hard as you can at a very hard task and getting almost nothing in return. This is what college athletes go through when they voluntarily play for their school. More of their time is spent on their sport per week than on education. Some of the college sports require very hard mental and physical work that could possibly result in a future career. Also collegiate sport organizations have millions to even billions of dollars that could be spared for the players that help keep it going.
This is why | think college athletes should receive compensation for their skills. It would help the players continue on in life if they don’t proceed of career in being a professional athlete and they work too hard to not get paid. The first reason why I think college athletes should get compensation is that almost all of their time is spent for their sport. Studies show that college football players average more than 40 hours a week on their games, practices, and training. The same players only get about 40 hours of academics in a week too.
The University of North Carolina filed a lawsuit and their lawyer, Robert Orr, said, “If these young men and women are going to come in and put in 30, 40, 50 hours, the least we can give them is a set of circumstances academically that really allows them to benefit educationally from what they have put into the athletics context” (Peter Jacobs, news reporter). With the athletes not getting as much time to study they should be getting paid at the least. My second reason is that the athletes put in very hard work and their sport might be a future career. What I mean by this is that there are 480,000 athletes in the NCAA.
Depending on the sport some of the athletes could advance to higher levels and would potentially have a career in that sport. For example studies show that Men’s Basketball players have a 19. 1% of going to some time of pro league which would potentially get them money. My point is that if an athlete is willing to work hard enough at a sport to try and make it their future career then at least give them compensation for it. My final reason is that the NCAA is a multi-billion dollar company and some of the money should be spared to the players that make it happen.
Statistics show that the NCAA makes nearly a billion a year. If you don’t believe me just ask former college athlete Kareem Abdul-Jabbar who said “It’s a $6 billion a year industry. Last year, CBS and TBS split up $1 billion just off of March Madness. There’s so much money being made and the people who are creating this wealth do not get to participate and they don’t get to graduate”(Mike Chiara, Newsreporter) The company then spends 81% of that money on media rights. 19% of that billion is still a lot of money, so the NCAA then spends 11% of it on championships.
Now my proposal is to lower the cost of the media rights to about 76% and the championship games to only 8%. This leaves plenty of money to distribute to the 480,000 athletes that make the whole organization run. If you count in the millions of dollars that each stadium makes per year then the organization has plenty of spare money to give compensation to the players. The main reason many people disagree with paying college athletes is because they think that giving them a full ride to college is enough. This is not always the case though.
There are many college athletes who practice, train, and compete for a sport and do not get any scholarships for college. Even for the athletes that do get a full ride to college they do not get any extra money to spend on stuff that they want. They practice their sport more than they study their education and they deserve to be paid for all of their time spent training and playing games. My proposal is for the NCAA to pay each athlete around 100 dollars for each game that they participate in. It may sound like a lot of money, but it really isn’t considering only a few athletes play per game and there are not that many games per year.
This is fair for all of the athletes because if you don’t play every game it will encourage you to train harder. College athletes should receive compensation for their skills and hard work. They work too hard and too long to not get paid. Some of the athletes may even pursue a career in the field of being a professional athlete. Also the NCAA has billions of dollars that could be sent out to the players that keep the association running. After all, how would you feel about not getting paid after putting in hours and hours of hard work?