#Should college athletes be paid full

adults ( N = 3,993) to gauge public opinion support for allowing college athletes to be paid. Specifically, we used information from a large, new, national sample of U.S.

It can also provide insight into the factors that predict public opinions, if variance in public opinion is analyzed comprehensively with appropriate theory and research methods ( Price & Neijens, 1997 Winter, 2008). Information from public opinion research is commonly used to help inform interested parties about the public’s concern over key issues that can directly or indirectly affect them. The purpose of this study is to analyze public opinions about college athletes being allowed to be paid, as athletes, more than it costs them to go to school. Yet, resistance to this arrangement has been clearly building ( Branch, 2011 Hruby, 2016 Huma & Staurowsky, 2011 Seton Hall Sports Poll, 2019). Consequently, college athletes are denied access to billions of the dollars that they generate, and adults in leadership positions defend the status quo, while disproportionately claiming the rewards. It is argued that college athletes should not be paid a salary or direct remuneration for performance otherwise, the popularity of the industry will suffer economic damage ( Nocera & Strauss, 2016 Tatos, 2017). Nevertheless, revenue increases have not resulted in much of an increase in compensation to the group that generates the money, the players ( Nocera & Strauss, 2016 Sanderson & Siegfried, 2015).Įven with increased revenue streams and the ability to provide more compensation to athletes, the long-held concept of amateurism and the new public-relations-driven moniker of the “collegiate model” are presented by defenders as nondebatable ideals for the industry of intercollegiate athletics. Also, a $7.3 billion television contract exists for the College Football Playoff and six associated football Bowl games ( Berkowitz, Upton & Brady, 2013 Gore-Mann & Grace, 2020). There is now a 14-year $10.8 billion television contract with Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) and Turner Sports for the rights to televise the NCAA men’s basketball tournament. Still, revenues in intercollegiate athletics have dramatically increased in the past 20 years.

#Should college athletes be paid full

Consequently, the leadership and policymakers in charge of college sports are overwhelmingly White, while the athletic revenue generators are disproportionately Black.Īlso, the commercially popular college sport industry is replete with highly paid coaches, well-compensated administrators, multimillion-dollar facilities, and significant perquisites for college athletes beyond academic scholarships-but no payment in excess of the full cost of attendance has been allowed for the athletes ( Nocera & Strauss, 2016 Ridpath, Rudd & Stokowski, 2019). Furthermore, White males are disproportionately NCAA administrators, and over 90% of conference commissioners are White ( Gore-Mann & Grace, 2020 Lapchick, 2019). For example, 80% of men’s basketball coaches and 86% of head football coaches are White, very much out of proportion to the percentage of racial/ethnic minority athletes that they coach. Conversely, athletic administrators and coaches are overwhelmingly White ( Harper & Simmons, 2019 Lapchick, 2019). colleges and universities, they comprise 56% of the participants in NCAA Division I men’s basketball and 55% of the participants in football. Although Black males make up <5% of the undergraduate population in U.S. Notably, these two sports are disproportionately played by Black males.

The sports of football and men’s basketball hold special distinction and generate billions of dollars of annual revenue-much more than other college sports combined ( Branch, 2011 Nocera & Strauss, 2016 Sanderson & Siegfried, 2015). Many college sports programs generate massive amounts of revenue, specifically in the highest competitive division (i.e., Division I) of the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA). college athletes, beyond educationally tethered compensation such as scholarships, has been the subject of significant concern and empirical inquiry for decades ( Nocera & Strauss, 2016 Mondello et al., 2013 Sack & Staurowsky, 1998).