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Analysis: Should College Athletes Be Paid?

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The American dream of making a living in sports at both the collegiate and professional level grows each year. The youth of today’s society strive to join the ranks of the professional athletes they worship, and college is the beginning of that dream. Over the past few decades, college athletics have gained immense popularity across universities in the United States. Intercollegiate sports bring in a surplus of revenue to their respective universities as well as build a reputation for the college. Athletes attending Division I sports go to their particular schools in hopes of fulfilling their dream of making it professionally. There is a long-debated argument on whether college athletes at the Division I level should be paid to attend school …show more content…

Cooper questions if playing at the Division I level is more of an extracurricular activity or a job. The amount of time and effort these athletes put into their respective sports trumps the amount of time put into their education. Preston R. Clark presents another side of the argument in his article, “Athlete-Student?”, where he focuses on the disparity among financial expenditure of an average student and an average athlete in universities in the United States. Both articles agree that it is acceptable for universities to pay student-athletes as long as both the school and the student are …show more content…

Cooper supports his argument that student-athletes are employees by including the common law of employment. Common law has three tests in order to classify as an employee: “the right of others to control a person’s activities, whether that person is compensated and if that person is economically dependent on that compensation” (Cooper, p. 13). According to the law, college athletes meet all three qualifications of an employee. The coach has control over their schedule, an athletic scholarship amounts to compensation for their time and effort, and players depend on their scholarship to fund for food, housing, and education. Clark focuses on the inequality between financial spending on students and student-athletes. The average difference between spending on an individual student and an athlete among the big six conference is $104,270 (Clark, p. 25). In addition to the difference between spending, the graduation rates from the big Division I schools have a lower percentage compared to the overall student body population. Alabama (75%), the University of Florida (75%), Louisiana State University (77%), and the University of Georgia (69%) rank among the top in the country for graduation rates in their football programs (Clark, p. 25). These statistics portray that all other Division I schools have less than 75 percent of their players graduating with a degree. The use of logos

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