Time to Pay for Play?
March 11th, 2009 - byBob Kravitz of the Indy Star recently examined the often contentious topic of paying college athletes. His conclusion was simple:
When athletes arrive at a Division I school, give them a choice: They can get a full-ride scholarship, with all the perks 
that involves, or offer them a salary of, say, $25,000 per year to work on their NBA, NFL or NHL degree.
That is, let them compete for the school, use the college as a paid minor league and do so as true mercenaries, with no requirement they go to class.
Not surprisingly the NCAA disagrees and fired back on the NCAA Double-A-Zone Blog.
First, Kravitz seems to suggest that all Division I grant-in-aid packages are for a full ride. In fact, many sports operate on an equivalency model in which partial awards are provided. This failure to distinguish between the two is a serious national misunderstanding, as noted in Bill Pennington’s excellent series last year in The New York Times. Since Kravitz appears to have equated $25,000 with the cost of an average full ride, his proposal would collapse of its own weight in the nonrevenue sports that provide equivalencies.
Kravitz also leaves the impression that college sports is awash in money, using the time-honored sportswriter tool of leading with the NCAA’s $6 billion media contract – conveniently omitting the contract’s term (11 years) and how the money is distributed (95 percent goes back to the membership one way or another).
NCAA President Myles Brand also weighed in on the column.
The reasons why this is a bad idea are far too numerous to present in this limited space. The overriding point is that it doesn’t solve the problem Kravitz thinks exists. Paying even only a few student-athletes would turn universities into entertainment corporations and misses the point that, for most, some college is better than none.
There are two other points that must be made.
First, it is unfair to the overwhelming majority of the 400,000 student-athletes who compete in college sports every year and are fully committed to earning degrees to single out this aspect of the college experience as the egregious anomaly that thrusts higher education into the abyss of hypocrisy.
To be fair, there are student-athletes who accept an athletics scholarship with no intention of staying for a degree. But there are also students, talented students, even prodigious students all over campus on every campus who receive scholarships but don’t remain to get their degrees. On average, in fact, 38 percent of all entering freshmen don’t. Are they all wasting classroom space and academic resources?
Of course not. And neither are the 36 percent of student-athletes who don’t graduate (fewer, on average, than all other students).
Second, for those whose preparatory record for college admission is acceptable (and it is immoral for coaches or anyone else on campus to recruit talented individuals who cannot do the academic work), any exposure to higher education is better than no exposure. One year is better than none. Two years is better than one.
The issue divides administrators and educators at every level. It also divides fans and alumni. Every time another pay for play scandal is uncovered the argument intensifies. Where do you stand?
