Justin Rheinstadter, Tommy Shero, Anurag Pandey
Meg Tully – CAS 138T
April 6, 2020
College Athletes Need Pay to Fairly Play
College athletes are essentially employees working thousands of hours to create billions of dollars. None of which goes to them. For years, their labor has been exploited by the NCAA and the schools that they attend. The NCAA makes over 1 billion dollars per year not including the hundreds of millions of dollars that each individual school makes off of their programs as well.
Professional athletes are known to make substantially large salaries, mainly due to the amount of revenue they bring in. College athletes playing for the NCAA, on the other hand, may make little to no salary while still bringing in large amounts of revenue for the NCAA, or their college or university. An argument can be made that college athletes receive scholarships which pay for a part or the entirety of their tuition, however, does this compare to professional athletes’ salaries. According to Forbes, the average salary of NBA players in 2016 was $6.2 million1. In the MLB: $4.4 million. In the NHL: $2.9 million. As seen in the Figure 1 below, the trends are significant.
Figure 11
In 2017, the NCAA generated $1.1 billion in revenue. CBS and Turner combined pay about $800 million in total every year to broadcast March Madness, and none of it goes to the players that make it happen. College athletes do much more than just that. They also help their schools generate revenue through ticket sales, making appearances for fundraising events and boosting the overall school brand.