Analysis: Why College Athletes Should Not Be Paid

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I have told you about some of the reasons as to why college athletes should not be paid. Now I will tell you the other side of this debate and as to why it is wrong. One of the opposition’s main point is that these athletes are put in the same physical risk as the professionals involved in each respective sport. To add on to that, they argue that if academics actually came first, then college athletes would not miss so much class time for his or her sport. Another reason is that these universities are making too much money to not pay their athletes. All these points are make sense, but they are not strong enough to overturn the thought of paying a college athlete. As stated before, one of the opposition’s main points is that college athletes…show more content…
It does not matter what division you are in, every athlete misses time for a sport. During the NCAA Men’s Basketball tournament, those basketball players miss a minimum of six days of class (“NCAA Raises the Bar”). Their point is that it seems like those college athletes are there to play sports, so the idea of the college athletes being amateurs is invalid. If the amateur label is taken off, then technically that makes them professionals, and deserve to be paid. This point is false because academics do come first for college athletes. Athletes that play for the NCAA must keep a 2.0 GPA in college or they become ineligible to play (“5 Reasons Why”). This simply proves that college athletes must take care of business in the classroom before they do on the field or…show more content…
For the 2011-12 school year, the NCAA brought in $871.6 million (“Revenue”). This is an outrageous amount of money, and is only projected to get bigger and bigger as the years go on. According to a study done by Drexel University Department of Sports Management, the annual out of pocket expense to athletes is over $3,000. These findings also concluded that taxpayers continue to subsidize food stamps and welfare of student athletes in order to fill in the gaps left behind by the NCAA’s scholarship cap. Those reasons are why people believe college athletes should be paid. The reason that they are wrong is that 96 percent of the money that the NCAA earns is distributed directly to the Division I membership or to support championships or programs that benefit student-athletes. The remaining 4 percent goes for central services, such as building operations and salaries
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