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College Athletes Should Be Paid

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Should college athletes be paid There has been many different arguments discussing whether or not college athletes should be paid or not. I’m not saying that any of them are exactly correct, however, in my opinion, they should. College athletes have put thousands of hours in their youth to get to where they are, and they don’t make a single dollar. The most money that a college athlete can make is in the form of scholarships to their university and through working their own jobs which none of them have time for. For me, I believe that college athletes should be paid because they spent their whole lives to get to where they are and because the student-athletes bring in tons of money for the schools. To begin, colleges should pay their athletes …show more content…

According to the NCAA, 81% of its money comes from televised games. This means that they are making 81% of all of their money because they signed a 10.8 billion dollar contract with CBS sports and Turner Broadcasting. All this to say that the NCAA is making billions of dollars to showcase their best athletes and they don’t share a single dime of that money with their “beloved” athletes. I believe that not only the schools should be paying the athletes, but the NCAA should be paying their athletes because they are the ones making all of their money and they aren’t even the ones who are giving scholarship money to the athletes. “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. Right now the average player earns just $23,204 in scholarship money” (Manfred). According to the official ESPN website, the university that brought in the most money in 2008 was the Alabama Crimson Tide bringing in a total revenue of $123,769,841 just from their athletics. This is including ticket sales, student fees, playing away games, donations, university subsidies, media rights, and branding deals. However, the average scholarship to an NCAA division 1 school is only worth $14,270 (Scholarship). So, according to those two sources, it is safe to say that college athletes are not getting paid what they deserve. The school are bringing in well over $100,000,000 and the athletes that are bringing in most of this money are making not even 1/100 of

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