With March Madness upon us, perhaps it's time to think about what it means to be an American. We should also reconsider what it means to be a college student. As it stands, the 700-plus men and women signed on to play in the largest post-season extravaganza in professional sports (wait, did I say "professional"?) are treated neither as Americans nor as college students. Instead, they are expected to exist in a peculiar socio-economic purgatory created by March Madness that we might call pseudo-amateurism.
In pseudo-amateurism, you get to live the lifestyle of a professional: your schedule is rigorously controlled like an animal at the zoo. You are given massive amounts of media training so you can protect your brand in the public eye. You are expected to practice several times per day, and even on weekends. Oh, and that academic thing? You can do that too, as long as it doesn't interfere with your full-time job.
But don't worry. Psuedo-amateurism doesn't deprive you of all the "thrills" of being an amateur. The one thing that keeps you amateur is the size of your paycheck. You'll be surrounded by millionaires, all of whom need you to show up so they can sell your services, but your compensation will be perpetually restricted to free tuition and a shiny new pair of sneakers. We should all be impressed with the business model of the NCAA, America's most powerful corporate gangsters: Get Congress to look the other way while you consistently violate both labor rights and anti-trust law so you can maximize profits by legally keeping your workers from having access to the revenue stream.
After teaching on college campuses for the last 17 years, I've seen up close how major sports competition can wreak havoc on the life of a young person. I've seen kids taken out of my class to play on ESPN games in the middle of the week. I've seen student-athletes wonder how they can help their mothers after they were evicted from their apartment in the projects. I've seen athletes lose their academic opportunities because they couldn't play on the field. I've even witnessed an athlete or two who received a college degree without ever learning how to read (with faculty serving as primary accomplices for their mis-education).
Perhaps it's time to start being realistic. The billions generated by March Madness rival the money earned from the post season of nearly every professional sports league in the world. At $613 million, the NCAA is earning over 40 percent more ad revenue than the entire NBA playoffs and over 60 percent more ad revenue than the entire post season for Major League Baseball. Given that professional basketball and baseball players bring home millions to their families every year, one has to wonder: What is the NCAA doing with all that money?
The money doesn't disappear just because the players' families don't get it. Instead, we see coaches exercising every inch of their labor rights, signing blockbuster deals worth tens of millions of dollars. One can't help but wonder if the NCAA is engaging in a form of academic apartheid, given that most of the individuals doing the work to earn this income are African American, and those receiving most of the economic benefits just happen to be white. One also has to wonder about the American public's perception that "a scholarship is enough," and whether we somehow think that a kid from the inner city should be happy with whatever he's given, in spite of what's been taken from him. The truth is that almost none of us would accept a scholarship as compensation for a job that generates tens of millions of dollars for somebody else.
At the end of the day, the bottom line is this: athletes and their families deserve labor rights. Whether the athlete gets a degree is irrelevant when compared to the millions that have been extracted from him, and even if he goes on to play professional sports, this makes the crime no less significant. The truth is that college athletes in revenue-generating sports are treated as neither Americans nor college students. Their ability to enjoy college is stripped by the rigors of their professional sports schedules and Draconian training regimen, thrust upon them by money-hungry coaches who could care less about education. The idea that Congress has conspired with the NCAA to allow athlete labor rights to be taken away in a manner that would be illegal in nearly any other industry adds insult to injury. Keeping athletes and their families in poverty while coaches and administrators get rich is not only fundamentally un-American, it is an embarrassment to us all.
Follow Dr. Boyce Watkins on Twitter: www.twitter.com/DrBoyceWatkins1
First of all, college is an institution of higher education. Sports is supposed to be secondary. Instead, it's all about the money. Instead of encouraging the concept of paying student athletes, how about we make these sporting events about SPORTS and not MONEY? That would be a good place to start.
Top college athletes get full scholarships. With most students swimming in debt by the time they graduate, these athletes, who are already accorded all sorts of privileges, are way ahead of the game by graduating without major debt. Isn't that payment enough?
For these athletes, sports is emphasized over education. Since most of them do not go on to play pro sports, they will have a harder time in the real world once they graduate. College sports are supposed to be amateur, and should stay that way.
College athletes cannot be not owned by their colleges and that's how it seems to be. A gilded cage is still a cage. Further, the seething mass of deceit and underhandedness that has grown like a tumor to exploit and outwit the NCAA system is no environment for a young person coming to maturity.
Right on target. I don't really understand how kicking a ball up and down a grass field is related to producing educated scientists, engineers, doctors, nurses, teachers, etc.
Get colleges out of sports.
Not to mention the fact that especially in football and basketball, these students not only pay their own way to college, they pay for financial aid and other programs for their fellow students through the income generated by the atheletes. Dont believe its all that much money? Look at the BCS payout for the 2011 National Championship game. $21 MILLION. Thats right. Divide that by 100 kids on the roster. Each player brought in $210,000 to their university. They saw none of it.But they did "make" about $10,000 in tuition for that year. Nice. "Hey kid, Thanks for the near quarter of a million, here's 10 grand in non-financial educational benefits, dont spend it all in one place"
Let's not even get started on merchandising and ticket sales.
So equitable. Not.
And in addition to tuition, student athletes get their meals for free, their housing for free, their books and fees covered, and they get to travel, and play the sport they love in big stadiums and on TV.
So would you pay all the players regardless of their families' financial situation?
And should the players at the University of Florida get paid the same amount as the players at the University of Central Florida?
Do you go by gate receipts? TV revenues? What about the Mountain West schools that aren't on TV as much as the SEC?
If a high school running back would rather focus on track and field in college, but he sees his buddy get a better paycheck for playing football, don't you think the school's track team will suffer?
And with all this money going out to athletes, what happens to the programs that would have used that money otherwise? It's not like a state university can just keep all the TV revenue. They have budgets that have to balance and those budgets are audited every year. So the money that comes in for football and basketball helps support the scholarships and travel and expenses for soccer, rowing, softball, etc. Should those programs suffer so we can pay the basketball team?
Yes I would pay all. This is not an issue of financial status. This is about compensation for work provided.
It all depends on whether the NCAA is paying the students in which case its all equal pay for the most part or teh schools are paying out of their revenues. If the latter is the case than obviously UF players make more than UCF players, they deserve to, they make it to bigger time bowls.
Yep I would include all of those revenues. Mountwain wwest players wouldnt make as much. Sorry guys.They would figure it out. Besides those programs wouldn't have alot of the resources they have by your own admission if it werent for say the football program in the first place.
I'm a lot more concerned with players, the majority of whom will not play in the NBA/NFL etc. who make millions for their school over their time there and see none of that revenue personally.
All what money, I don't think people are suggesting that they get the same as NBA contracts just compensation above tuition, room and board, for the value they bring to the school. Some of these bigger schools already pay coaches $2 million a year, if the school took a chunk of the coaches salary and paid the players a stipend above the tuition no other sports would suffer.
I responded to Jalen Rose's post on this subject, too. The bottom line is, either all NCAA athletes get paid or none of them do. As it stands, many of them are getting a free ride to school. $50K per year isn't enough?
And as I pointed out in that other response, the athletes who have no chance of going pro and who are just doing it for the love of the game, are using this opportunity to actually get a college education. Women athletes' graduation rates are much higher than the men's, and men who participate in sports like crew, for example, also use their scholarships to get an education. These athletes put in no less practice time or travel time (particularly if they are Division I) than basketball players or football players.
So, perhaps Dr. Watkins, the question you should be asking is why are so many male athletes not prepared to attend college as a college athlete? If they don't have what it takes to perform academically, why are they getting recruited by some of the best academic institutions in the country?
It's time for the NCAA to enforce academic recruiting standards so the majority of athletes who don't go pro can actually get an education.
Professor, you make some points the sharpness of which is not immediately eminent. Perhaps I am laboring under a misunderstanding, but athletic scholarships are in their own way a gamble on the part of the students; the objective of whom is being drafted into the professional leagues.
As a professor of finance you are familiar with the concept of risk being commensurate to the rewards. Given the revenue streams received by even the poorly ranked players in the professional leagues the forgoing of 2 to 4 years of "full time work" is a fairly good initial investment. Let us briefly examine the opportunity costs of the players then, along with those of traditional students.
While the income data for college students isn't readily available and I hesitate to use median income data for people with "some" college education let us be kind and assume $20.00 per hour, for season length (26 weeks) and see how that stacks up as an ROI.
Athlete Loss Due to Season 20,800 (before tax) * 4 $83,200
(Add) Cost of Attendance on an Athletic Scholarship $ 0
Total Investment including forgone pay: $ 83,200
Athlete Return Value (salary): $531,463
Traditional Student Annual Loss $(83,200)
(Add) Cost of Attendance without a Scholarship $196,608
Total Investment including pay received: $ 103,408
Non Athlete Return Value (salary): $ 48,661 (Bloomberg 2010)
Athletes are the victims here?
Read more: http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_much_do_college_teams_receive_in_'prize_money'_for_attending_and_or_winning_in_the_NCAA_tournament#ixzz1HFDcNv7l
That is a huge misunderstanding because the vast majority of scholarship athletes don't go on to play the sport professionally. You're looking at this issue through the prism of the few that go on to become pros
Those who are lucky get to make 340k+ before graduation. How many traditional college students make that sort of a salary upon graduation? Not many. I still fail to see how they are victims here, or how Dr. Watkins' comparison of the NCAA to slavery is appropriate (it is made on his website fyi)
I am tired of people suggesting that money will end poverty. Ideally it would but some people are going to be poor no matter how much money they are given? Why? Because they don't know how to manage it. There are plenty of rags to riches to rags stories out there.
You're not really doing any of these kids any favors by enforcing the idea that they should have dollar signs gleaming in their eyes. You might do them more of a service if you encouraged them to place more of a premium on a good education and for some of them better communication skills.
It's like the old line, "Give a man a fish, he eats for a night. Teach him to fish and he eats for life."
My wife and I had lots of jobs while in college and no cartel told our employers we couldn't earn what the market would bear.
These athletes make substantial amounts of money for their schools. That income is far in excess of the cost of their free or reduced tuition from scholarships. These students have the equivalent of unpaid, full time jobs. They should at least get minimum wage for the hours they put in.
This is why they get free tuitions, which by themselves are far above their earning potential coming out of high school. Thanks, move along.
On top of that he is a FINANCE professor. I just ran some numbers on his allegations relative to "post-graduation" income on the part of lowest paid major leaguers and the figures are mind blowing. 500k a year starting with a minimum of 345k min seems like a pretty good return to me.
In related news the weighted salaries of people who actually graduate college with an average indebtedness somewhere between 20,000 and 30,000 are 48,000 and change. This is in contrast to the above mentioned athletes whose debt upon graduation or withdrawal is 0.
College athletes are the victims, they also never forgo studying in favor of keggers.
1. The players can all go play in professional minor-league basketball, and leave space in the classroom for students who want to be in college, or
2. Take away all the TV contracts and let them play just because they enjoy it, for whatever fans are willing to attend the games.