According to the financial research site Zacks, just the top 15 college football teams combined make more than $1 billion in revenue each year. The players who generate this money, however, receive no official salaries for their work.
The debate over whether college athletes should be paid salaries has been a heated topic for decades, ultimately resulting in the current system in which, depending on the level of college sports, universities can offer a limited amount of partial or complete scholarships to athletes, but no salaries and the players are forbidden from any sort of advertising deals.
Supporters of a compensation based system believe that student-athletes have the right to a share of the profits they bring in and that scholarships are not enough. One proponent of this system is senior Nick Cintron who has committed to play baseball next year at Cornell University.
“I believe athletes that create revenue for their universities have the right to some level of compensation,” Cintron said. “College sports is officially an amateur sports program, yet the NCAA is a billion dollar industry.
Those who oppose compensation for college sport, however, argue that the opportunity to receive scholarships is enough of a reward itself.
“Many of the athletes that earn significant profits for their universities are attending school on a full athletic scholarship, which grants these athletes an opportunity to earn a four year degree for virtually no cost,” said senior Nathaniel Scheinman, who will play baseball at Skidmore College next year. “Meanwhile, the majority of the student body has to pay tens of thousands of dollars and will likely have to endure the stress of student debt.”
Cintron, however, argues that baseball teams such as Georgetown University only have 11.5 full scholarships to divide up between their 35-man roster, meaning that most players on those teams only receive partial scholarships.
Student athletes at Division III schools as well as Ivy League schools are also forbidden from receiving athletic scholarships. The college-bound athletes all agreed that college athletes at all skill levels and on all different teams should not receive the same amount of compensation for their work.
“A bigger school that is more successful will receive more publicity and it would be unfair for someone like me who is attending a Division III school to receive a salary that is equivalent to someone on a National Championship team,” said senior Justin Han, who will be playing baseball at Middlebury College next year.
For Cintron, it seemed unrealistic for the colleges to be expected to all pay the same amounts even if they were making different amounts of money from their athletics programs.
“I think it should be a specific percentage of the revenue every athletic program brings to their university,” Cintron said. “For example if the baseball team at Cornell brings $1 million to the Cornell University, the players would be compensated a specific percentage of that revenue.
Finally, for some, the notion of college athletes being paid workers ruined the nature of the sports.
“College sports would lose its purity, Han said. “Athletes would be playing for themselves with the mind-set of making a paycheck as opposed to playing for the love of the game and for their school.”
Scheinman, meanwhile, saw a bright side for the sports themselves if colleges introduced compensation based systems.
“Should football and basketball players begin to earn a salary in college, I believe that we would see less early entries into the NFL and NBA draft, which would draw more attention to the respective college sports,” Scheinman said.