Should College Athletes Be Paid

Improved Essays
Should College Athletes Be Paid For Their Performance?
College Athletics bring millions of dollars to some of the biggest universities around the country. Coaches get paid immense salaries based on the performance of their players and due to the increasing attention in college athletics it will only continue to increase. Huge sums of money are generated through college sports and college athletes should be acquiring enough to live comfortably aside from their athletic advantages.
College athletes, according to USA Today (Wieberg), are full time workers that put in over 44.8 hours per week but according to NCAA rules coaches can only demand 20 hours a week (Josephs). Beyond that, players currently spend about 33.6 hours studying and completing homework for the classes that will earn them a college
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Coaches are prioritizing sports over academics and the student athletes have little to no say. Most people would agree that sports controlled by the NCAA are as popular as professional sports, but in order to achieve the same status, preparation and practice is an essential part. In an interview with the Huffington Post (Zenor), Stanley McClover, a former football player for the University of Auburn, admitted to getting paid during recruitment and while playing for the Tigers. McClover would receive seven thousand dollars from a undefined booster club as well as three hundred to four hundred dollars at the end of each game, depending on his performance. Further into the interview, Stanley McClover began to get emotional as he told interviewee John Zenor of the Post that without that money there would not have been a way to support himself while in college. In 2011, the NCAA (no author) reported that only 2% of high school student athletes were awarded athletic scholarships to compete at the collegiate level. This statistic

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