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Elijah Sapp
Nick Lakostic
English 2367
3 March 2017
Student Athletes Are Not Employees
There’s been an ongoing feud between many people who watch college sports for some
time now. This feud is over whether or not college athletes should be paid to play. Both sides of
this argument have been very persuasive and unwilling to compromise to come to an agreement.
However, even though there may be a few good arguments for paying college athletes, they
shouldn’t be paid because they’re student athletes not professionals. A few other reasons for this
is they’re already getting paid just not in cash and paying them would ruin the way the different
sports games are played at the collegiate level.
Many college athletes believe that they should be paid because of all the money that they
bring into the university. This argument makes it easy to believe that college athletes should get
paid, since some of them are bringing in large amounts of money. But what about players of
sports that bring in a very little amount of money or kickers on the football team that don’t have
as big of a purpose as the quarterback, should they be paid less even though they put in just as
much work? Business Insider a news website that reports on politics and sports has an article
about athletic scholarships written by Tony Manfred who goes on to write that “The fair market
value for the average FBS football player is $137,357 per year, and the fair market value for the
average men’s basketball player is $289,031 per year” (Manfred, 2). With this statistic the
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questions arises of should the athletes see this money? Later on in the Business Insider article it
states that “Right now the average player earns just $23,204 in scholarship money” (Manfred, 3).
This then leads to the conclusion that the players do get to see the money they bring into the
university. It’s just not always in the way they’d want it in which would be cold hard cash.
But there’s still a significant portion of the money they bring in that they don’t get to see.
This is where everyone who believes college athletes shouldn’t be paid comes in to point out that
the athletes do get to see the money they bring in to the university, you just have to look a little
harder to see it. The athletes get free meals provided by their university, they get advertisements
that professional scouts see at the expense of the college and putting on sports games is not free,
it’s an expense that the schools take in themselves. In an article found in USA Today written by
Steve Burkowitz about athletic departments taking subsidies “At a time of tight budgets
