I’ve been contributing to the fine website Saturday Down South, which covers Southeastern Conference football. One of the editors there has a commentary today attacking the idea of paying college football players:
The fact that [paying players] is being brought up is preposterous and borderline offensive to the ordinary student and spectator.
I do know that [NCAA President Mark] Emmert is against paying college athletes, and I can only hope the other presidents and chancellors are with him, or at least will be on board with him after the meeting takes place.
Let’s talk a little bit about the college student-athlete and the benefits he/she already receives.
The collegiate student-athlete already gets paid to play in college. It’s called a scholarship. You are getting an education for free – books, tuition, etc.
Along with getting a full scholarship and an education for free, housing and meals are also included in that scholarship.
So, along with the pre-paid education, housing and meals, the student-athlete has access to any type of tutor he/she wants or needs to help take care of any academic issues. Sure, the common student has access to these tutors as well, but the student-athlete gets paid access to tutors.
The average college student leaves college with $25,000 of debt. With full scholarships intact for football players, student-athletes have a chance to leave college with ZERO debt.
The other side of that equation, however, is that the student-athlete’s ability to earn additional money beyond the scholarship is heavily restricted by NCAA rules. A musician who goes to Auburn on scholarship is allowed to earn outside income from her talent. Yet the NCAA bans athletes from earning any income related to athletic ability — even if it’s in a different sport then the one he or she plays in college. Furthermore, student-athletes are denied the sort of “internships” with potential future employers that are commonplace in every other academic discipline.
That said, I tend to agree that there’s no great injustice arising from the NCAA’s decision not to directly pay athletes beyond the value of their scholarships. But this has never been a debate about “paying” players. It’s a debate about whether to classify student-athletes as employees of their respective universities. That is what the NCAA wants to avoid at all costs. Former NCAA president Myles Brand addressed this subject in 2003:
The skeptic … will say, “Well of course you are opposed to pay for play because you want a free labor force.” Not true. I don’t want a labor force at all. That isn’t the role of student-athletes, and we must be vigilant in sustaining that principle. The direct and immediate result of pay for play is that we will create a labor force, and in doing so, we will have abandoned the collegiate model forever.
Creating a labor force, as Brand put it, would mean putting college athletes on the payroll of (mostly) government-run institutions. That would qualify them for the same types of benefits as university workers — and in many cases enable them to unionize. And if players are “employees,” then the NCAA’s thousands of rules would face the same sort of antitrust challenges as the NFL or any other sports league. Suddenly the government, at all levels, becomes a much more active part of college athletics. And that probably won’t improve things for athletes, schools, and especially fans.
The comic tragedy of all this is that unlike the “ordinary student” who might get offended if players suddenly got paid openly, it’s these same players who have demonstrated the necessary work ethic to achieve something after college that many of their debt-ridden classmates lack. Jeffrey Tucker, lamenting the lack of teenage work due to government restrictions, noted that first jobs are about more than money:
To have a “work ethic” means the willingness to experience discomfort on the way toward the completion of a job done with excellence. This doesn’t come naturally. The “natural” thing is to stop doing what you are doing when it begins to be something discomforting or when more is expected than you want to give. But this approach goes nowhere. In fact, if this is your approach, you trim more and more until the point that you become a sofa slug, which pretty much describes — a whole generation. [...]
You quickly learn in any job — and especially low-paying ones — that it hurts to work, physically and mentally. You must focus intensely for longer than you really want to. You do things you don’t like. You can find every excuse to drift off but you can’t because there are tasks that must be done. And if it is the right kind of job, if you don’t do the task, it doesn’t get done and then everyone up and down the line that depends on that task finds their tasks are harder and so everyone hates you.
This is a pretty darn good description of what college athletes go through. Yet for a host of legal, cultural, and financial reasons, the NCAA and its members must go out of their way to convince kids that what they’re doing isn’t really work. And that may tell you all you need to know about what is wrong with higher education today.
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Interesting topic. Many years ago, a friend I played ball with in HS was a HS all-American, got a scholarship to a Pac 10 school, was a college all-American, then got drafted #3 in the first round. He was an All-Pro safety before he got sick and died tragically at 31. Broke my heart, as as great a safety he might have been, he was an even better individual. Anyways, was speaking to him (if I recall, it’s been over 20 years, might have been after his rookie season) right after he was drafted. What irked him more than anything about college was that he was Mr. All-World, We Love You, You’re Awesome on saturday but during the week he was in reality a poor kid whose mom worked two jobs to give him some spending money. He went to, let’s just say a school in a very affluent area, known for it’s students socio-economic status being (very) upper middle class. Leaving campus and doing anything was an expensive affair, and he had nothing. And so his college experience in many ways was hardly what one would think it would have been. And he resented how the school made millions off him and his teammates and he got nothing, or wasn’t allowed to. There’s a great deal of cynicism to be found.
Now, here’s the other problem, and it’s one I believe libertarians can agree upon. We recognize the importance of free trade and contracts, but accept fraud as a crime. Well, there’s the rub. What the colleges are doing is, in my opinion, committing fraud.
One, many colleges admit student-athletes (especially in football) whose academics are far below the minimum for acceptance to the university. And the know that the graduation rates for football players are horrible, which makes sense as they come to school ill prepared and unable to complete college level work. So, by saying to them “You get a ‘free’ college education”, in truth the schools know this to be false. Many, maybe most, will never get that “free education”. In effect, they’re trading a bogus item, one the students will never actually realize.
Two, they’re selling a degree as some sort of valuable commodity, when in fact for years now it has declined in value. And, to top that off, the majority of majors for football players are in soft disciplines which have far less marketable value. Which means that what they’re trading isn’t what they claim it to be.
And worse, to get that “free education”, they have to perform services which make it extremely difficult. College football is a full time job and then some. And since the contract terminates after the fifth year (assuming the redshirt year and all that) there isn’t an option for the students to finish up afterwards. (I could be wrong here for some schools but by and large, it’s 5 and done. No BA, oh well.) Which means that for services rendered, full payment isn’t returned. That’s not fraud I gather, but certainly a breach of contract.
Paying college athletes, or at least recognizing that going to college is an expensive activity and compensating them in some form, is hardly a radical idea. In fact, it makes perfect sense, especially given the extreme fascist tendencies of the NCAA. These athletes are making millions and millions for their schools and are in essence treated barely above chattel slavery.
Between the recent ouster of Jim Tressel at OSU, the ouster of Pete Carroll at SC just before that, the Cam Newton scandal, Rick Neuheisel’s reign of terror at Washington, Mike Leach locking players in closets at Texas Tech, and so many. many, many other examples, I for one am happy that the purity of NCAA competition is being preserved by not paying players.
Anyone see the recent “South Park” episode where they poked fun at Universities for treating athletes like slaves with Eric Cartmen dressing up as a Souther slaveholder in order to make a business arrangement with one of the University’s presidents.
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