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Essay On Why Student Athletes Should Be Paid

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The NCAA is an organization of 1,200 member schools/ universities that have banded together to form the rules of college sports. The NCAA head office enforces these stringent and mostly unnecessary rules for the sake of maintaining the extremely high salaries of coaches and athletic directors. Because many athletes can't afford necessities like food, the colleges and/ or the NCAA must reform their “code of amateurism” so that players may receive compensation for their play.
Many proponents of the NCAA and opposes of “pay for play” (paying student athletes for their play) often make the argument that if athletes don't want to go to college, they don't have to. This is far from the truth. Since 2006, the last year high school students could go straight from high school to the pro’s, only three athletes in football and basketball combined have made it to the pro’s without having gone to college. Essentially to play your sport, you must go to college and you must play for free (Drape). Every athlete knows that in order to …show more content…

Recruiting the best athletes doesn't mean recruiting the best students. Because of this, it is difficult to have top notch players stay academically eligible. To maintain eligibility, many universities have these athletes take “paper classes”. In these classes, the athlete does not have to show up to class but they must turn in a paper at the end of the semester and the papers are usually marked A or B. This is the reason why at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill so many football players were “taking” Swahili (Native African language) but never learned anything. In the case of University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, the paper classes situation was investigated and the NCAA found no wrongdoing on the part of the university (Drape). This sent a message to all other colleges in the country that they can do this same scheme and get away with it because the NCAA will turn a blind

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