The sheer injustice exposed by John Oliver and his team at Last Week Tonight is happening right now in Massachusetts, and we have the ability to change it. I urge the Massachusetts State Legislature to pass a law classifying that all athletes at a college or university, where a majority of the student athletes receive scholarships for playing, shall be classified as employees under state and federal law, and shall have all the protections afforded to them as such. Let’s make it happen!
Please share widely!
What protections are you looking for? They already get scholarships (ie substantial compensation) which bugs me no end as along as a supposedly academic institution isn’t doing the same for high school quiz bowl champions. Schools also bend over backward to keep them even if they have academic or conduct records which would lead non-athletes to be shown the door. I’m just not in a mood to do more favors for “student”-athletes.
So is the Taylor Branch article from the Atlantic Monthly…
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/10/the-shame-of-college-sports/308643/
…but I’m just philosophically opposed to coddling the athletes more. They are there for education; sports is just a voluntary extra-curricular like any number of other things (or at least should be).
(My internet connection is also acting up so I can’t watch videos or even follow links to load additional pages very easily at the moment.)
… when the athlete is done playing, whether it is because their eligibility has run out or they’ve run afoul of NCAA or university / team rules. Basically they are used for cash cows for as long as the system can make money off them. Unless they are good enough to go pro, they can end up with just about nothing at the end.
It’s a complicated problem because the vast majority of student-athletes are indeed that – in sports that you don’t see on TV or rarely see covered by the media. Those students don’t necessarily need the protection. This is a problem of the big money sports.
There is also the whole socio-economic angle. Kids who otherwise would never step foot on a university campus are exposed to an environment which has the potential to offer a step up for them. Whether they take advantage of that depends on the person and the people around them.
…is focusing on preparing them to make it in a field other than sports. Again, they were supposed to be there for education anyway. They should not be using sports as a crutch. Where the universities are wrong is admitting students in the first place who would not otherwise qualify if they did not play sports.
… doesn’t matter much. As a friend always tells me when I’m having a problem understanding a situation, “Follow the money”. The NCAA and the universities are making way too much for them to change anything because they “should”.
Unfortunately sports don’t seem likely to go away anytime soon. It is distracting to actual learning on a college campus. That said, this is more of a stop gap measure to help students.
They are wrong for deliberately avoiding actually providing a real education to athletes who make them money. They are also wrong for allowing their coaches to burden the players with so much training and practice time that they barely have time to study or even to go to classes.
The fact is that for all too many college athletes, sports is a full time job, not something they do on the side for fun while they get an education.
Sports should be no different from other extra-curriculars, though in reference to your comment below I could see requiring them to cover medical costs for injuries sustained in sports (though again, something that could be rendered moot by single-payer care).
Sure, in an ideal world, college athletics should be purely amateur and done as an extracurricular activity. That is simply not reality and it will never be that way, at least at Division I schools. Those schools will *never* give up the revenue and publicity they get for televised sports.
Also, I would say that any activity that you are absolutely *required* to participate in order to earn your scholarship cannot be considered as merely “extracurricular”, especially when the required level of participation exceeds 40 hours a week, even on the off season.
I’ve used the word “should” pretty generously on this thread. That word is an indication that I know it is not current reality and want the reality to change. I agree that hourly requirements should (there’s that word again) not exceed that which is reasonable to focus on academics.
That would be nice, but it is not going to happen. Why would it? The NCAA has entirely sold its soul media revenues and no longer looks out for the welfare of student athletes (if it ever did). Universities are addicted to the TV revenue plus the alumni money it draws, and the prestige it brings. What do they care if their athletes ever learn anything?
Given that it is not going to happen, I would at least like to see some protections put in place to make sure that student athletes are no longer unfairly exploited for their relatively cheap labor.
guaranteed progress towards a degree. Meaning that if you do X time (two or more years?) then you can come back (if you don’t finish) whenever and finish for free. They also should have some significant stipend that means that they can live without worry during their college years.
They should be student athletes, not professional athlete wannabes masquerading as students. If the pro leagues want minor leagues to act as feeders to their teams, then let them finance them directly and have the schools go back to their primary mission which is to educate, with athletics a diversion, not a purpose.
Schools only bend over backwards for athletes that make them money. If they don’t pan out or get a career-ending injury or worse all bets are off. In those situations you can bet colleges are going to bend over backwards to rescind the scholarship and you can forget about them even considering paying for long-term medical costs.
Why not have colleges collude to prohibit them from being compensated with money?
The could coach for the love of the game as a extracurricular activity. In the meantime they could have full scholarships and four years eligibility to get a good college education.
At the end of four years coaches would be eligible to go to the professional leagues and actually make a living.
Why should student athletes be the only ones who are coddled? We could coddle college coaches and still save a ton of money! Win Win.
It probably wasn’t right that I was paid as a Teaching Assistant when I was in school. Or my fellow students who worked in the library, the cafeterias, etc. Heck, our work wasn’t bringing in anywhere near the money as the football and basketball athletes, so by what rationale did I deserve that money??
…with a comment about the difference between sports and work, but I reconsidered the context and realized you might have been being sarcastic.
I was being sarcastic but I do need to comment about the “difference between sport and work” line. The two do overlap. Ask any professional athlete.
There are many entertainment activities that people do just for the fun of it. When it has the potential to become a job is when you have enough people who are willing to pay to watch and especially if TV is willing to pay to broadcast it. No one wants to see my friends and I make noise that approximates music in my basement a couple of hours each week. That doesn’t keep me from doing it, but if there was a large interest in hearing us, I’d certainly expect to get paid.
The only differences I see between what happens at The Big House in Ann Arbor on fall Saturdays and an hour east at Ford Field on Sundays are:
– More people can fit into the Big House.
– Ford Field has a roof.
– The football players who play at Ford Field get paid.
Sure, if that really is their job pay them; though don’t get me started on those extreme salaries. There’s one other difference for your list is that Ann Arbor players are by definition amateurs.
You do realize that the word “student athlete” was only coined to avoid paying the people playing the sports, right?
We could also choose to apply the word “professional” to athletes who play on college teams, simply by paying them.
Voila! They’re professional.
…student athletes are so named because they are just that. We’re not having this conversation about student musicians, student artists, student actors, or student journalists are we? Plus its not like many of them are not well compensated by virtue of their scholarships, many full boat. Until we start offering that to those who pursue activities more closely related to actual academics, the reason schools exist after all, I don’t want to hear it regarding more favors for athletes. They are and should be essentially volunteers.
As said in the video, the term student athlete was created by the industry to deflate the need to pay them. The term is a semantic one and should be reconsidered.
I don’t want to pay them. If you are enrolled in one of these institutions your first responsibility is to be a student, period.
Read this.
Student journalists, student musicians, etc. can all be paid, and often are. For example, you can hire a student string quartet from local conservatories to play at your wedding or party. The NCAA forbids athletes from making money directly or indirectly or else be banned from NCAA events. No other organization controls students more tightly.
I question how valuable those student scholarships really are when in order to earn them players often have to work so many hours at their sport that they don’t have enough time to actually learn anything and often don’t even graduate with a degree.
In any case, it really doesn’t matter what you think should happen in an ideal world. Sadly, the NCAA and the Colleges and Universities that participate in the system disagree with you.
It seems entirely appropriate that we should pass laws that deal with the real world as it exists, not some idealized but false version of it.
I’m not sure how one hires out his own athletic skills the way a musician might. Would, for example, a student athlete not be able to be paid by a nearby high school to coach its team in the same sport in which said s-a himself plays? If so I would agree that’s ridiculous.
I suspect that it’s not allowed, but it’s a remarkably impractical suggestion. Getting paid to work in sports clinics during the summer is a far more reasonable possibility. And, as it turns out, NCAA regulations permit the University to employ its student-athletes as counselors in camps and clinics in all sports except for football according to Notre Dame.
One obvious way a star athlete could make money would be to get paid for appearing in ads or endorsing products. Of course, only the small number of athletes would ever be able to take advantage of that, but it is hard to justify the restriction purely on the basis of interfering with the student’s academic studies.
student actors, student musicians and student journalists can all get paid.
My student paper, for example, paid something like 5 cents a word when I entered college.
Ann Arbor players are about as amateur as the actors in any of today’s “Amateur” porn tapes.
n/t
Isn’t that what is currently happening?
I attended a large ACC football school (Go Hokies! Please lay off the Vick jokes) and was always perturbed by the way that NCAA and athletic department money sloshed around the campus but I had liberal arts professors who had offices without phones or computers. Disgusting.
I’m actually a fan of pulling some of the money that the colleges & NCAA makes in this racket and putting it towards the students, but not while they’re in school.
The argument for the students is they put in lots of time & effort into their sports and few go on to play pro. Many graduate with poor grades or degrees with poor employment prospects because they focused on athletics and not academics. Others graduate with injuries that will follow them for life.
I’m a fan of a chunk of the money going into a “pension/401k” type system that pays out to the athletes AFTER they graduate. Let their scholarships be their “salary”, but let the money they earn the school, NCAA, ESPN and all of the licensing companies go into a pension that will pay out after they’ve invested their time & formative years of their lives.
I think it would be good to do both,
It’ be much more complicated to pass a bill mandating that, because it still wouldn’t classify them as employees.
If that’s the case, they still won’t be able to form a union, or be entitled to healthcare.
let me be the first to point out that there are no ACC football schools.
There are basketball schools, and there are non-basketball schools who are trying real hard, and there are non-basketball schools that don’t even seem to be trying.
Football is something to keep us occupied until November, and to provide an excuse for standing around outside eating Q for 5 hours before the game.
But I digress.
I think it’s important to follow the money more carefully.
1. Most universities don’t see a dime. Instead, the athletic departments receive, and spend, the money. It seems to me to be a good thing if athletic departments are self-sufficient. Major D1 football programs typically pay for 100% of athletics through the athletic departments and boosters, with no transfer from the academic side. This strikes me as a good thing.
2. Most college athletes are neither football, basketball, nor baseball players. Most college athletes are very costly from a cost-revenue perspective. Remember, tuition ain’t cheap — the boosters are footing that bill. Similarly, facilities and travel ain’t cheap either — the football team revenues foot that bill. So, if you like the idea of non-revenue college athletics (gymnastics, soccer, volleyball, swim and dive, softball, lacrosse, field/ice hockey, wrestling, crew, sailing, fencing, track and field, water polo, tennis, cross country, golf, etc), understand that the two choices are either that football makes a bunch of money, or that tuition or student fees are raised to pay for it.
I think that the universities should focus on realigning conferences to reduce travel. It would save money and reduce the burden on the student athletes. I also think that the universities should figure out a way to stop gold plating football facilities in an effort to bring in more recruits; it’s really overkill and a strange race to the bottom. And, they really should do a better job of positioning athletes to be more successful off the field after college, no doubt. Short of that though, I don’t really have a problem with football (and to a lesser extent, men’s basketball) bringing in the dollars necessary to support all of those non-revenue programs.
Disclosure: I dated a diver in college. I met her in my econometrics class — she was no dummy. She graduated in 4 years with a high GPA, practiced 20 hours a week, traveled for meets up and down the East Coast, and also managed to be well adjusted. She likely wouldn’t have gone to uni without diving though — the scholarship made a big difference financially.
if universities weren’t paying millions a year for coaches and building 100,000 seat state of the art stadiums, complete with spas for their players.
So maybe the idea that athletic departments are ‘self sufficient’ isn’t a good thing, particularly when they’re raking in millions of dough without paying players so much as minimum wage for their hours of practice, training, videos, games and so on and so forth.
Methinks they could pay their football and basketball coaches 1% less and pay their players as well as the students who work in the campus book store, selling the school’s athletic jerseys that student athletes advertise for free every game, and sometimes on national TV.
Rye, I love you, but you’re way off base here. You know where the money comes from to pay for the scholarships, the locker rooms, the facilities? It comes from the people in the stands. Not the ticket price either — I’m talking about the donations to the booster program. Marketing helps (teevee, jerseys, etc.), but for most athletic departments, the significant money comes from donations.
Without the 50,000+ seat stadium, the athletic department couldn’t cultivate a fan base large enough to fund volleyball. And, I’d add, if the program goes 3-8 a few years in a row, watch as the revenue falls considerably, making in that much harder to fund swimming.
P.S.1. There are eight college football stadiums with capacity in excess of 100,000. The median D1 football stadium is 49,250.
P.S.2. Saban is the football coach who makes the most: in excess of $7M a year. But the median: just under $1.5M. (source). 1% of $1.5M is $15k. There are 85 scholarship athletes on the football team, plus walk-ons. Call it 100. That means everyone gets $150 on the Rye plan, with no money for non-football athletes. This is not a very good plan methinks.
I know where you are coming from, but I think we have to get back to the things Oliver points out in his piece. Is it worth that price to fund all of those other sports? Should football and basketball athletes be treated the way they are (both the good and the bad) just to ensure that other students get to play lacrosse w/o the time demands required of the major sports athletes?
and, I think, the right one.
What most folks seem to miss is that the universities aren’t making money hand over fist. The money stays in the athletic department, and is spent there — primarily on facilities and scholarships, with a tiny fraction of the money going toward salaries.
If the spending is “out of control” it’s on the coaching salaries and facilities — but how does the NCAA dial back the spending on those two items specifically? Cutting back on revenue doesn’t help, because that squishes everything or at least other things too.
a stipend.
Or, heck, let students make money from their work. Why shouldn’t students be able to make endorsement deals? Or get a cut off the jerseys that are sold which have their number on them?
The NCAA tries very, very hard to keep student athletes desperately poor. It’s not right.
Will the UMass kids be state employees? Will they make more in the private sector? Will they make more if they compete in three events? Should they concentrate on one event if they’ll make more for better results? If they’re employees, what protections will have? My daughter’s coach’s kid started more games than she did, can we sue?
Journalism majors can sell articles in college.
Music majors can make money playing & singing.
It’s a terrible double standard that athletic students can’t make money off their athletic skills. It’s especially awful when you consider that many, many student athletes are African-American and have this liberty to earn money taken away.
the colleges aren’t paying the Journalism students for their articles, or the Music majors for their musical performances. If the athletes can find a way to make money on the side from their athletic prowess, then great, but why should the school pay them? The schools should be there to educate, not train for a most unlikely professional career as an athlete. If so, then they have been far more successful doing the former, and very unsuccessful at the latter.
The NCAA forbids student athletes from making any money on the side.
Why should the school pay them? Why should the school give them a scholarship for something that has absolutely nothing to do with the academic mission of the school?
If the school is going to sell their work product, it seems that they should get a cut.
My student paper paid its student writers. It was a paltry sum, but it was still a paycheck.
The money for the student paper — which was given away for free — came from the university.
So, yes, colleges can and do pay students (including journalism students) to write for their own college-funded student-run newspapers.
…that it is generally the case that writers for student newspapers or members of campus musical ensembles are compensated for their contributions. Those are considered extra-curriculars even if one has to buy the paper or a ticket to see a concert and sports should be too. If they are selling their services outside of that context and on their own time they are certainly free to do so. I don’t think there is any reason to bring race into it.
is we should strongly consider whether or not we even want to have a NCAA, as currently formed.
If college sports became truly amateur — and resembled club teams (which more closely resemble a high school level of competition and cost) — we could just have a “minor leagues” of football, basketball and so forth, that aren’t populated with students.
The kids interested in going to college and playing sports can still go to college and play sports, just like thousands of baseball players have, while the kids who aren’t interested in that route — and want a more athlete-focused direction to give them the best shot of getting into the “majors” (or at least earning money while playing) could sign with a minor league team. Just like many thousands of baseball players have.
Some of the college athletes will want to try to play professionally, once they’ve obtained their degree. They can then try to get into the minor leagues, just like many baseball players do every year.
This would
-Allow people focused on athletics to earn a living while playing their sports.
-Allow people focused on athletics and their education to continue to be focused on athletics and their education.
-Allow colleges to focus on education, and eschew dumping tens of millions into athletic programs that could be much better spent.
-Allow these new “minor league” teams to be ran like a business instead of a way for universities to create their own patronage systems and spend money on things that aren’t needed, while denying their players the most basic human rights.
Hell, many of the big college programs could be turned into private non-student teams, keeping the same uniforms and names — and pay the colleges for the those rights and access to the stadiums. Let the private teams worry about how much coaches are actually worth and pay for other big costs, while colleges could then use those teams as profit-making institutions.
One of the motivators for today’s facade is the desperate funding needs of colleges and universities.
If the US followed the European (or at least German) model, where most colleges are publicly funded and attendance of qualified residents paid for by the government, then there would less demand for the perceived cash-cow of college football and basketball programs. Sort of like health care, in fact.
In my view, this charade is another example of a failure of our essentially religious reliance on “free market” and “privatized” approaches. Our colleges and universities are in trouble, and this issue joins the student debt crisis in the list of exhibits demonstrating just how serious that trouble is.
Sort of like health care, in fact.
Could you elaborate on what you mean by the European / German model? In that case, is there little/no cost to the student?
The problems discussed here are as prevalent at American “Public” universities (and maybe moreso) than private. Only one school (Northwestern) in the Big Ten (Fourteen) is private.
We may call our US schools “public”, but attendance is not paid by the government.
In Germany, any qualified resident can attend university at essentially no cost (there may be incidentals, out-of-pocket tuition is about 60 Euros/year) but nothing comparable to the US model). There are certainly drawbacks to the German system — students are “tracked” at a much earlier age (5th grade), for instance.
Those who graduate with a suitable “Abitur” are generally entitled to government-paid attendance at a university until graduation. My wife (German) attended university for something on the order of ten years, ultimately receiving a PhD in Biology (human genetics).
I agree with you that the very term “public university” means something very different in Europe than it does in the US.
can go for free.
They don’t even have to be a German resident.
If your kid wants to go to school in Germany and gets in to wherever he/she applies, he/she can go for free.
I find college hockey to be an interesting example since there is a development route for 16-20 year olds (the Juniors) that was and remains a non-academic alternative to the college route. It has only been the last few decades where playing college hockey has been seen as a viable route to the pros – and some players go from one system to the other (especially if you hit 20 and can’t stay in the juniors anymore). Pro hockey also has a minor league system.
As the college route has become more popular, some of the issues of the more popular sports have also creeped in.
The MLB rule is that once you enroll in college, you can’t play pro ball for 3 years*. You don’t have to go to school for 3, but you can’t play in the minors or the majors.
There are a few places where college baseball has huge following (USouthCarolina), but by and large, its attendance measures in the 100s or less. It’s much more like college soccer and much less like college football.
But, it’s changing in a way similar to hockey methinks.
* the Cape Cod league and some other very minor leagues have summertime exceptions.
…between getting an education and an athletic career in the prime of your life? I might understand not doing both simultaneously, but it sounds like if you enroll at all you’ve locked yourself out even if you drop out within the three years. Actually, I thought the reason minor league baseball didn’t start until summer was because some of the players were still in school earlier in the year.
The thinking is this:
Nobody benefits when a kid does 1 or 2 years in college and then jumps to the pros. The college invested in this kid only for him to become a dropout. MLB waited two years to develop this talent full time, thereby suffering opportunity cost. The kid lost wages and didn’t get a degree.
Why 3 and not 4? I really don’t know. I suspect that a lot of ball players can get in 3.5 years before spring training, and if they wanted the degree, taking some extra courses along the way might allow them to graduate anyway.
Minor leaguers report to Spring Training this week. College baseball doesn’t finish until June.
They start trying out kids as young as six and then enroll then in their soccer academies all the way to adulthood. There’s no question about what the priorities are.
I have very little knowledge of how European sports academies work.
There are a number of not-public high schools that seem to produce a large number of college basketball stars. They are often Catholic schools (e.g. DeMatha), military schools (e.g. Hargrave), or more frequently now, Protestant schools (e.g. Oak Hill Academy).
That’s not 6, but it is 13 (shrugs).