Not One Dime for Labor
Worth remembering in this week of March Madness that the labor, i.e,, the players, receive not one dime of the millions in revenue that the NCAA and schools pull in.
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While at the same time, ADs are lining their own pockets at the expense if, well, everyone else by chasing the highest dollar and breaking up the Big East.
It’s just the boon-work they’re doing on the lord’s demesne.
I handed out a bracket with all the 2012 teams in it at a teacher’s workshop thingy on critical thinking and divergent thinking (and bullshit!) that were seeded and advanced one round based on their graduation rate for men’s basketball. Asked them to figure out what was being used to run this Big Dance.(Playing the whole thing down that way, the principle is too obvious…)
Took six seconds for the participants to say ‘Hey, that’s not right.’ Took ten minutes to figure out what the actual principle was…
Oh please, not this again. They get a free college education, which is something a lot of kids would love to have.
The entire incentive for the kids to graduate is penalties that had to be put in place so that graduation rates would not be too low. If you want to get to know what education is like for the average football or basketball athlete, I would urge you to do so before saying things like this.
If the penalties are their only incentive to graduate, maybe the remedy lies with the “kids” themselves. I’m just tired of people in this debate treating a full college scholarship like it’s so much chopped liver.
Yes, rather than improve the system and treat student athletes fairly, let’s cut off one of the only ways for many African-American kids can get a higher education.
It’s not chopped liver, but kids on other kinds of scholarship aren’t subject to the same kind of restrictions, including particularly income-generating restrictions, that kids on athletic scholarships are bound by.
Paying the players a more-than-nominal stipend isn’t my favorite solution either, and while I wouldn’t phrase it the way you did (“maybe the remedy lies with the ‘kids’ themselves”), but one of the big thorns in this problem is the sense we have that for D1 mens basketball and football players, the “free education” they’re receiving isn’t the education their fellow students are paying (or getting scholarships) for, and that’s a problem both from the student side and the university side.
But my favorite solution (dismantling the apparatus of big time college sports) is not going to happen in my lifetime, so next I look at a lot of money being made and it’s not hard to figure out who I think is really earning it.
The players do not get a full college scholarship.
College coaches of D1 basketball and football are usually the highest earning state employee by far.
How would you feel if you couldn’t even afford a snack here or there, but the guy that recruited you is making over a million dollars a year?
Exactly. Nick Saban made $5.8 million last year. His players had to work for a “free education”, whether they wanted it or not. If Saban was worth 5.8 million, what was the real value of his players to the university? A hell of a lot more than a lousy scholarship.
With all due respect, they *still* are granted a free college education. Many might not be properly prepared for college, many might not receive the support they should from their universities (although many/most D1 schools have mandatory tutored study hall for football and basketball players), and all this might be part of a larger corruption of both academia and sport – all these criticisms and many more are valid, I will accept them all. But please, for the the love of God, please stop acting like these are indentured servants.
I am not sure if you have noticed from inside the university bubble, but the cost of higher education has been exploding for the last 35 years. Higher ed is becoming one gigantic scam for the vast majority of those enrolled. One story after another on the plight of the recent college student/graduate being crushed to death by student loans (I am well aware of this phenomenon – I am one of Campos’ doomed younger law school grads). One story after another about how the cost of college has put it out of reach for some many families, or stolen retirement from the parents of college students. Have you seen *any* of the 10,000 stories on this in the last couple of years?
The basketball players get that *for free* so long as they play a game. A game, nothing more. High pressure? Sometimes, yeah. Time consuming? You bet. So is working 20 hours a week in college like I did. But the education is *free*. Oh, and being an ultra-stud on campus like most revenue scholarship athletes are is a pretty solid fringe benefit if you ask me.
They’re not slaves, they get something that is increasingly expensive and increasingly needed to even have a shot at a decent middle class life, and *they don’t pay for it with money*. There are far worse deals.
That is absolutely nothing like what these kids are required to do. Try again.
Oh that’s right, they have battle ghouls in pits filled with poisonous snakes while reciting Plato *in ancient Greek*. Every. Single. Day.
It’s not that much. Don’t overplay your hand.
I think you need to familiarize yourself more with the lives of college athletes.
I’ve known a few. A friend from my high school team played on the varsity team at the Big Ten school we both attended. He was good too, was in the NFL until recently. He was busy, but didn’t mind. Why? Because being on the football team at a major college is itself an awesome experience. Lots of kids do it even w/o the scholarship. They’re called walk-ons. Most of them never have a shot of making scholarship. They do it anyway. In fact, so many people are interested in signing up for this hellish, uncompensated extracurricular activity that they have to have tryouts to even be a walk-on. Even then, most competing for a spot are turned away.
What a nightmare it must be to instantly be one of the coolest kids on campus and be able to say “I’m a Fighting Illwolvereye”. Terrible.
Bottom line, all snark aside: They do receive a dime for their labor – a free education. That’s not worth nothing, however much you might say it is.
Amen.
If anyone wants to curtail the obscene spending on college arenas, training facilities, coaches’ salaries, etc., I’m with them. If you want to argue that throwing even more money at athletics in the form of athletic stipends is the answer, you lose me.
If your main objection is to the statement that they do not receive a dime for their labor, you are right. They receive a free education, sort of, which has some value. But what they receive is a mere pittance compared to actual value of the labor they provide for the universities. So, bottom line, all snark aside, they are being exploited, with or without their so-called free educations.
To Sherm:
Yes, their compensation (in the form of a full ride) is a pittance compared to revenue generated.
Might I introduce you to the entry level employees of [ENTER FORTUNE 500 COMPANY HERE]?
It’s about the same, and, if the school in question is private, probably approaches the value of that entry level salary.
Here’s the roster for the 2012 OSU football squad. I count 104 players on roster. Assuming OSU is at the 85 scholarship limit exactly and there are no players who are “on the team” but not the roster, there are 19 walk-ons being exploited w/o compensation. Why on Earth would they do that? Couldn’t possibly be because being a Buckeye is an amazing, once-in-a-lifetime experience…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_Ohio_State_Buckeyes_football_team#Roster
“If you want to argue that throwing even more money at athletics in the form of athletic stipends is the answer, you lose me.”
So you’re a fucking douchebag. Got it.
“Yes, their compensation (in the form of a full ride) is a pittance compared to revenue generated.
Might I introduce you to the entry level employees of [ENTER FORTUNE 500 COMPANY HERE]?
It’s about the same, and, if the school in question is private, probably approaches the value of that entry level salary.”
Oh look, another fucking douchebag. Get brad in here and we’ll have a veritable convention!
Brien, I am not a douchebag. I just disagree with you. I believe my position has merit, quite a bit in fact, even if I am sympathetic to arguments about problems with and corruption in college athletics.
Oh no, equating the value of college football/basketball players to entry level employees at a Fortune 500 pretty much solidifies you as a total douchebag. And, your opinion notwithstanding, does not, alas, have a lick of merit.
Brien, you won’t say why.
I am simply noting that while the value of a year’s full-tuition scholarship is a “pittance” compared to the revenue some college sports programs generate, the same can be said of the compensation paid to the typical employee of a great many large and highly profitable companies.
That’s all. And I fail to see how my point, which is that a full tuition scholarship means that a player is not doing something for nothing, is a weak one. Please elaborate.
“No, everyone of those schools spend the same amount on educating college athletes: $0.00.”
Well, if you say so, accounting king…
1. Your analogy fails on its face, in that you’re comparing ALL college players to a small subset of employees at a different company. Now, if you wanted to compare, say, redshirt freshmen to entry level workers that would be one thing, but that’s pretty obviously not what you did.
2. More substantively, the idea that the workers providing the most value to the money making enterprise are comparable to entry level employees at Initech is absurd on its face.
Okay Brien, redshirt freshmen then! On scholarship! Not paying the $15-$50K a student not on scholarship is!
Lifetime savings for our RS freshman cum entry level employee: tens of thousands.
Talk about a distinction w/o a difference…
So where are the high value employees at in your analogy, then?
Brien: Why don’t you go ask some poor kid struggling under tens of thousands of tuition debt who the douchebag is?
And also too, go fuck yourself.
Really, that’s the best you got? You counter an allegation of douchery by proving that at best you’re a reactionary reveling in the ability to screw someone over for no good reason?
Interesting strategery general.
Of course, this is decades in the past, but I had a couple of friends on the OU football team. They were constrained in their choices of classes and the number of hours they carried–the coaches wouldn’t let them get into anything very academically challenging. So, it’s not quite a “free college education” without strings attached
Can’t threaten your eligibility, and you’re also limited by the necessity to schedule classes around the time of your sports commitments. If that means you still haven’t graduated when your sports eligibility runs out and can’t afford to graduate because you don’t have a scholarship anymore, well…sucks to be you kid.
There are certainly strings. But the education received (if we believe that has any value, plenty of people might not) costs them nothing but their time and effort. That is, Adrien Peterson and the 3rd string scrub on OU’s team both spent the same amount of money on their classes for credit and housing at OU:
Zero.
Funny, Oklahoma spent the exact same amount on educating them!
If we assume that everything was by the letter of the law — ha! — it’s almost certainly not true that either of them, and especially the “scrub,” paid $0. It also wouldn’t be surprising if the “scrub” was never older than a sophomore whose predecessors lost scholarships for not being as good as AP.
Fine. Oklahoma sucks. Stanford doesn’t. Duke doesn’t. Northwestern doesn’t. UNC doesn’t. UVA doesn’t. Berkeley doesn’t. Vanderbilt doesn’t. Michigan doesn’t.
I could go on and on. A full tuition scholarship *counts for something*. It’s not an unpaid internship.
No, everyone of those schools spend the same amount on educating college athletes: $0.00.
Also too: there is still no such thing as a “full tuition scholarship.”
Counterpoint, please read:
mark f, thanks for that info. If that is the case then colleges should increase the award to cover that cost. I’m still unclear as how this means that college athletes on scholarship are uncompensated for their labor (although this isn’t exactly your point).
You’re right that a stark “uncompensated” is incorrect. The point that everyone else has made, that you’ve ignored, is that is in many cases inadequate compensation. Do you think LeBron James would be better off if he’d had a deeply discounted year of school instead whatever few million he made as an NBA rookie? And that’s even assuming the education has value, which given the time constraints and expectations on athletes — and, frankly, in many of their desires — is dubious. Furthermore, players in football and basketball are restricted from pursuing athletic compensation on an open market — i.e. from the pro leagues; the next LeBron will be required to wait a year after a high school — and restricted from earning any money from their fame as players or even as clerks at the Stop & Shop.
The title of the post is that they get not one dime. They do, in the form of scholarships. That was the reason why I started posting here, to push back against that argument.
To your point: LeBron? No. LeBron caliber basketball players (there are few of them who can handle the high school to pros jump to begin with)? No.
Everyone else? To the extent college is equivalent to a AAA minor league squad? Yes.
And most college athletes who are constrained in choice of major, well, there are a lot of options between electrical engineer and basket weaving, and most athletes pick something in the middle. Like most other (paying!) students at the universities.
With regard to athletes being allowed to work and the myriad nonsensical NCAA rules governing x, y, and z, I won’t defend that. But I don’t think I need to do so.
Yes, you do, because you’ve repeatedly moved from your pedantic “har har, there is so one dime, Big Liar Loomis” non-point to “that one dime surely is fair.”
I’m not sure I think it’s fair exactly, not sure it’s an unconscionable deal either. But it’s a hell of a lot more than “one dime, Big Liar Loomis!” It’s many dimes. Hundreds of thousands of dimes.
1. Your logic that it’s “just a game” certainly does not apply to football, given the high chances for very serious injury as a result of their unpaid labor.
2. If free college education is such a great deal, why doesn’t ANYONE else employed by the athletic department (including student employees) accept payment in said fashion?
(including student employees)
Pretty sure it’s uncommon for a student employee at a athletics department to be compensated in the form of a full tuition + room and board + books scholarship, but I bet many such students would jump at that in lieu of a salary for their (likely part-time) work…
Well, yeah, but that’s a rather unbalanced calculation. How many of those student employees do you reckon would take an equivalent value of their actual pay in the form of credit against their bills with the university as opposed to actual monetary payments?
Better still, why don’t big time coaches take compensation in the form of free graduate school classes or something rather than seven figure salaries?
Why not indeed? The coaches probably already have college degrees. Why not make everything compensated via free education for x, y, or z? If you want to challenge the entire concept of “student athlete” be my guest, but the point stands: scholarship athletes aren’t doing something for nothing. Far from it.
“How many of those student employees do you reckon would take an equivalent value of their actual pay in the form of credit against their bills with the university as opposed to actual monetary payments?”
Not sure I understand the question here. Isn’t this what work-study programs are?
“scholarship athletes aren’t doing something for nothing. Far from it.”
Neither are unpaid interns, right?
I’m not sure you’re following. A scholarship athlete is compensated in the form of an “athletic scholarship”, one that is (for the revenue sports that make people wring their hands about exploitation – no one gets wound up over the gymnastics or swim teams) usually a full tuition + room and board + books scholarship.
That compensation, measured by what they’re paying for their educations (here, zero) versus what they’d pay for such w/o one (tens of thousands of dollars or more), has a readily defined value. An unpaid internship is one that by definition has no direct compensation that can be measured in dollars.
It’s pretty simple.
“(for the revenue sports that make people wring their hands about exploitation – no one gets wound up over the gymnastics or swim teams)”
Please, go on telling me more about how I’m the one who doesn’t know what I’m talking about, right after you tell me about all of the gymnasts on full ride scholarships.
Brien, you keep avoiding the point. A full tuition scholarship counts as consideration for being on a college athletics team. Is this that hard to grasp?
Well now we’re moving the bar down immensely, aren’t we? After all, if we pay our employees $5/day, we’re still paying them, right?
“Well now we’re moving the bar down immensely, aren’t we? After all, if we pay our employees $5/day, we’re still paying them, right?”
???
CP — Its not fair consideration, not even close, particularly to the athletes with no interest in obtaining an education.
Since you seem to like legal terms, its an unconscionable contract of adhesion which the universities get to shove down the throats of the athletes, who have no bargaining rights whatsoever.
Didn’t call you a troll. Said you were trolling by defending the exploitation of labor. And that is precisely what you have been doing.
Sherm,
I’m not sure I would say it qualifies as unconscionable, and whether it qualifies as fair consideration, I would say that (1) depends on the program in question – after all, many schools’ revenue sports programs (e.g. football and men’s b-ball) are money losers, and (2) whether or not a discount worth tens of thousands of dollars (minimum) off a college education is fair in exchange for playing a sport.
“I’m not sure I would say it qualifies as unconscionable…”
So let’s get this straight: Players are “paid” in non-liquid funds that cost the university $0.00 and that don’t begin to equal the amount of value they add to the billion dollar business they’re participating in. They’re also subjected to incredibly tight regulations that include how many hours they can work to earn actual liquid money, they’re prohibited from using whatever celebrity status they may have to earn money from someone other than the university (the NCAA and said university, however, will market their image for mounds and mounds of profit without making any sort of payment to the players in exchange for marketing their image), and reach so far as curtailing the player’s freedom to even choose where he wants to attend school once he’s signed a scholarship. That’s not unconscionable?
Remember when you couldn’t figure out why I called you a douchebag? Any less murky now?
Still pretty murky, Brien. The vast vast vast majority of those students on scholarship don’t have the celebrity status Tim Tebow does. Most of them have no celebrity status off campus to cash in on at all.
And the cost of the education they’re receiving is tiny (see, I acknowledge the existence of dread student fees and agree they should be covered to begin with) compared to that other 99%+ of students at that school.
The compensation is not nothing. It’s actually quite large. Also, books aren’t free. Food isn’t free. Utilities and medical care aren’t free. And I am not even getting into the amortized cost of having someone attend the school w/o paying for that spot (it’s called ACCOUNTING, Brien). But please keep up the condescending prick routine, it’s working out so well for you…
Weird that I always see middling Red Sox players in local advertisements, or Patriots cheerleaders at charity events. But I’m sure Random Crimson Tider has absolutely no cache in Tuscaloosa.
How much cache is that? Does he start? Is he an o-lineman or the QB? How much is being a career special teams player really even worth?
Yeah, that basically gives away the game that counterpoint is just working from “players should not get paid because garble garble” to any convenient argument he can find handy.
“How much cache is that? Does he start? Is he an o-lineman or the QB? How much is being a career special teams player really even worth?”
Why does it matter?
Where did I say players shouldn’t get paid? When did I say they should?
All I am saying is that they’re not f-ing slaves like all of you seem to be indicating.
“How much cache is that?”
> Not One Dime
I think its pretty clear what we’re dealing with here. Counterpoint is pissed that he had to pay for college (and law school) while the athletes did not, and his jealousy blinds him to the exploitation of the athletes by the universities and the NCAA.
When counterpoint grows up and starts practicing law, without a pension, without dental, without eyecare, and with a shitty medical plan, he’ll grow jealous of the public sector workers and will complain about all the benefits they receive while he gets so much less for so much more work. Again, he’ll be too fucking stupid to direct his anger at the right targets, and will just be jealous of those who haven’t been fucked as bad as him (in his distorted view).
Ayup.
Sherm,
That was uncalled for! I’ve been out of law school for a few years, and no, I am jealous of athletes at all. I love college sports. I’m just not going to pretend like they’re frigging diamond miners in Sierra Leone because their scholarships come with restrictions (some of which are reasonable, others not).
Jesus, you’re a touchy bunch, aren’t you!
Yes, people here get touchy when commenters troll by defending the blatant exploitation of labor.
I see counterpoint doesn’t understand the concept of marginal costs, either.
I’m not a troll. I just think you’re wrong. Jesus Christ, god forbid someone have the temerity to offer a counter point. Fuck you all. I’m done.
Right, I mean, when you’re saying that workers being vastly underpaid aren’t exploited because there’s slave labor in Sierra Leone, it’s totally incomprehensible why people might find you to be a bit troll like, right?
Though I will at least grant that your level of argument has been quite a bit better than the “NCAA athletes aren’t workers because the athletic facilities are REALLY NICE!!!” troll from the last thread on the topic, anyway.
Seriously? Ten scholarships or so per team for how much revenue? Lets look at Syracuse for example. They put 30,000 or so people in that dome about 15 times per year and receive tons of tv revenue in exchange for 10 scholarships at the cost of 50k or so each. Sound like a fair exchange for the players’ labor?
And whether these players actually receive an education is another issue.
Also note that there are such things as walk-ons and Ivy League schools that have no athletic scholarships (so #14 seed Harvard’s students get nothing).
They get something, just not “athletic” scholarships. Also, many of them had no shot at a Harvard or a Yale or a Princeton w/o being recruited for a varsity sports team.
A friend of mine from law school played lacrosse at an Ivy League school I won’t name. he had a great SAT score (over 1500), but about a B- C+ grade point average in high school. If he wasn’t a lacrosse superstar, no Ivy League admission. Happens all the time.
Yeah, an acquaintance of mine from law school was a starting linebacker at Cornell. He was one of the dumbest men I ever met in my life. No way he gets into any decent school without football, let a lone an ivy league school.
Isn’t that called ‘affirmative action’>
Oh, give me a fucking break. For all the money those kids bring into the school – not to mention the long-term health problems players (mostly football, I know) open themselves up to in the process – waiving tuition isn’t anywhere near the compensation they deserve.
And of course, you don’t address any of the other issues raised by the linked article, like why scholarships aren’t guaranteed for four years or why players shouldn’t be eligible for worker’s comp. But hey, the “value” of their free education – or at least, however much of it was completed before they get hurt and booted off the team – should be enough to cover that. Maybe they can sell their old textbooks, after all.
Give me a fucking break yourself. Do you have any idea how expensive a free ride is at most colleges? I’d have loved that when I was in school.
Also, IIRC, you can’t be “booted off the team” for being injured. If your coach really wants you gone, he can try to make your life miserable, but he can’t just tear up your scholarship because you aren’t performing.
” Do you have any idea how expensive a free ride is at most colleges?”
Um, it’s exactly $0.00 expensive.
Also too (fucking quick send buttons):
“Also, IIRC, you can’t be “booted off the team” for being injured. If your coach really wants you gone, he can try to make your life miserable, but he can’t just tear up your scholarship because you aren’t performing.”
If you’re going to be an insufferable, condescending prick, do try not to be a raging ignoramous on top of it.
Oh? You think football players can just lose their scholarships at the coach’s whim?
They can.
Well, at least Saban is an at-will employee who can be terminated at any time. It would be really obnoxious of him to take that stance if he had an 8-year guaranteed contract.
It’s not like the federal government has been investigating the NCAA for issues such as this one, to the point that the NCAA was forced to finally change the rule on this matter (over the strenuous objections of Nick Saban and other football machine coaches) to not PROHIBIT schools from offering anything more than one year scholarships.
Oh, wait…
OK, I stand corrected.
But I still think it’s wrongheaded to act like a free college education is nothing.
Yes, because they can. But go on, keep proving your ignorance.
Most of the time they owe fees, which can be as much as $10,000. Obviously that’s much cheaper than $35,000, but a “full ride” isn’t a “full ride.” But you’re right — they do get a good opportunity. I’m sure the Chem 322 exam went great for the kids from Kent State who spent finals week prepping for the Go Daddy Bowl in Mobile, AL. And they can lose their scholarships for no reason at all. Are you a junior third-string OLB and your school just hired a new coach? Good luck in your next endeavor, buddy!
Scholarships are year-to-year. They don’t give out four-year scholarships. Schools can and do leave ‘unproductive’ athletes hanging.
Correct. A lot of people think that “full” athletic scholarships cover the entire four years of eligibility a college athlete has, but they don’t. They’re one-year commitments that can get renewed every year until the athlete has exhausted her/his eligibility.
This means that an athlete who gets hurt may not have a scholarship renewed the following year. In fact, the California legislature recently passed a law that requires (some) California universities to offer academic scholarships to athletes who lose their athletic scholarships due to injury. Before that, the hurt athletes were just tossed aside.
This practice is particularly insidious when coupled with the practice of oversigning, the latter of which a certain football coach at a certain state university located in Alabama is notorious for. Coaches who oversign offer more scholarships than they actually have to give out, and then “clear out” players who are hurt or who may not be as good as the players the coaches want to bring in.
Then there’s the practice of grayshirting, in which a recruit is brought to school on a less than full-time basis and whose scholarship is deferred. But the recruit is in danger of having the deferred offer withdrawn and then given to another player.
Generally true but a kid who loses his scholarship can appeal:
“The one-year renewable scholarship, with a limit of five years of athletic aid, has been in place since 1973. Kevin Lennon, the NCAA’s vice president for academic and membership affairs, said the 37-year-old policy has not been a frequent topic of concern among member schools. He noted that NCAA rules require colleges to provide athletes who lose scholarships with an appeals option, typically consisting of a campus panel formed from outside the athletics department. But such arbitration is not common, he acknowledged”
I have no idea how many kids use this and, if so, how many win. I expect its very few and that most kids who lose a scholarship try to transfer.
Yeah, you can appeal it (though it would be pretty hard to do so successfully), but being unable to play due to injury and/or not good enough for the coach’s liking are still valid reasons for yanking the scholarship.
You forgot to scare quote “education” and in many cases the “college” part to given the increasingly proliferation of online and other non-traditional classes used to keep athletes eligible.
In the real world, people with a talent in demand get to shop around their skills and negotiate with buyers in order to get what they want.
In the world of ‘amateur’ athletics, people with a talent in demand get absolutely no choice but to accept far below market rate with absolutely no negotiation whatsoever.
That’s the problem. It’s not that college educations aren’t worthwhie, it’s that players get no say in deciding what their own talents are worth.
This extends, by the way, to “transferring” to another program if you want to attend graduate school at another university. You are only allowed to do that if the new school offers a program the old school does not, and even then your coach still has to sign a waiver allowing you to play sports for the new school. Student athletes indeed.
If a free education (or, in some cases, “education”) is everything a player could possibly want and represents their true value, then no need for any further restrictions on compensation, right? The market will produce the same result!
And a pony!
At this point, nobody making this argument can possibly have any serious concern for the welfare or the education of these students. If you gave a shit about anything other than dismissing this line of argument so you can go back to enjoying or materially benefitting from the system as it is, you’d already know better than to try this nonsense.
But players not being paid is a small price to pay for how clean and corruption-free college sports are, right?
Erik ,I guess now that Kentucky is headed to the NIT you’re right about the tourney–but I digress. When we talk about sports and labour it’s important to understand that all major professional sports leagues are structured in a manner that effectively kills job opportunities for athletes. NCAA sports do a wonderful job of protecting the NBA and NFL from competition. The owners and a small clique of players reap the benefits. If the NCAA was disbanded any number of young people could find work playing basketball in America. Many of them may in fact have no desire to earn a university degree–which I understand is taken by many people as the marker of one’s human worth–but would like to earn a living from work. As someone who generally supports free markets I don’t understand how anyone can oppose the right of players to negotiate with universities the terms of their employment. Most Canadians who hate Gary Bettman don’t realize that the NHL itself has thwarted the development of professional hockey in Canada. Really compare the number of jobs for soccer players in England in which they can earn the average employed person’s salary with what exists in Canada.
I see absolutely no reason to believe that professional sports don’t represent a clear example of a natural monopoly, especially given the fact that the market hasn’t been able to sustain even football leagues that aren’t directly competing with the NFL.
I was thinking this, but on the other hand, you can pretty easily argue that college basketball/football basically cannibalize the audience for professional minor league versions of those sports. By comparison, in hockey and baseball, there were already thriving minor league systems before the college versions became a “product” and do the college versions aren’t as big a deal.
But if college sports went away, you wouldn’t get different pro leagues jumping up to keep with the existing big boys, those existing leagues would just create minor league systems like MLB has. The NCAA allows those leagues to outsource much of the cost of player development (especially the NBA), but they don’t prohibit the development of rival professional leagues so much as the fact that the public doesn’t want to watch the UFL does.
Agreed.
Well, except for whatever scholarship money they’ve been given.
Erik, is your objection here that NCAA athletes receive no compensation or that they get no cut of the obscene amount of money associated with Division I football/basketball programs?
Both.
Which isn’t to say that the theoretical education is no compensation at all, but as many commenters have pointed out, the real value of that education, ability to actually receive that education, etc., is often quite limited.
What about college students who are involved in minor revenue-generating enterprises for a college or university who also don’t get paid? Are students in performing arts groups who don’t get paid Equity/IATSE rates being exploited? Folks who write without compensation for the campus newspaper? Unpaid projectionists in campus film groups?
The difference though is that they are not prevented from being paid. Well the OTHER difference between the several orders of magnitude difference in terms of revenues generated.
Or face higher risks of physical injury as a result of the activity.
I would love to see evidence that school newspapers generate significant revenue.
OK. Poor example, but I’ve done a poor job expressing my thoughts all around. The idea that unpaid college athletes are necessarily exploited is wrong, as plenty of students engage in unpaid activities that benefit the university as a whole and no one objects. Student athletes shouldn’t be paid for playing sports and universities shouldn’t be in the business of subsidizing minor league sports franchises. Pull out and Robert Maynard Hutchins the NCAA from orbit.
You’ve established that some students engage in activities for which they aren’t compensated, yes. How that demonstrates that students whose activity generates billions of dollars in revenue for the NCAA and supports seven figure salaries for coaches and administrators aren’t exploited I…don’t know.
How much should they be paid?
Regarding the value of the education, the game is kind if give away on that one by the reactions of people in the very few cases where athletes try to assert their own agency in receiving said education. I don’t see to remember tOSUfan reacting very well to Robert Smith deciding he might actually want to get his premed degree for example.
Are university athletes in the US generally compensated with wages, salaries, or gifts? Is the NCAA self-sufficient, or does it spend more than it earns? The article you’ve linked to suggests that revenue generated far exceeds operation costs, but elsewhere I’ve read (specifically in the context of Title IX), such programs routinely over-spend and always require federal aid. Perspective from US-Americans, please?
For a non-profit organization, the NCAA is shockingly surplus revenue-generating.