College Athletes

With March Madness coming up and all the hype over college basketball I have been hearing a lot about the idea of paying college athletes. Between college basketball and football, 6 billion dollars in revenue are produced (New York Times), but the athletes see none of it. Being a Division 1 athlete in college can take up as much as 50 hours a week, and that commitment leaves very little time for schooling. I found this disturbing because college is first and foremost for education.

With the commercialism of college athletes the students can sometimes lose sight of reality. Jerseys bearing their names, and their inclusion in very successful video games both help to inflate feeling of self importance in collegiate athletes, but the truth is very few of them have careers in sports. Basketball players only have about a 3% chance of going pro after they graduate. The athletes that have the best chance are baseball players, a whopping 10.5% end up in the MLB. 


I realize that college athletes getting paid may cause more issues, like bidding for potential students or uneven wages for athletes, but even with those potential issues I feel that paying student athletes would be a good thing. Because they cannot focus as much on their schooling, many athletes end up not being overly successful later in life. For the coaches, winning is everything. They do not particularly care if their athletes are struggling to find time for everything in their lives. Because of this, athletes, even though they often receive scholarships, often are left with large portions of their schooling to pay off.


I may not know all the details, but it seems to me that something must be done in college athletics. Whether it is paying their athletes or finding a different option, the current methods are not working as well as they should.