Sixteen percent of NFL football players go bankrupt after their football career ends. That is the top percentage of college football players, the ones who succeed to their final goal, are going bankrupt at a high rate. The players who do not succeed enough to go the NFL now are forced to change their plans and start a life, when their whole life was about football. This financial difficulty starts in college where the athletes have no ability to acquire income and begin a financial plan. In-season college athletes can have twenty hours of athletics, 15 hours of classes, and five to ten hours of study hall a week, all mandatory. This makes being a student-athlete sometimes more work than the typical forty-hour work week, yet no pay. With this being said, there are still more aspects to college than the athletics and school and definitely many other costs. Division 1A college football players should be paid because of the extra attributes that come with the student athlete experience that can create a potentially difficult financial situation now and in the future. The players should be paid by the NCAA and the conferences who acquire hundreds of millions of dollars a year off of the players' names, likenesses, and talents. 

To begin, college athletes have many additional costs that go past the basic financial aid that the scholarship provides. There are still additional costs like toiletries, food, and clothing that put a financial burden on athletes who do not have the time to have a job and make income. This is where at the moment there is a stipend that is adjusted for the cost of living at each individual school, but it still can only be up to $500 a month. Joe Nocera, a New York Times writer says that "studies estimate falls on average about $3,500 short of the full cost of attending college annually" (Nocera). This creates a difficult situation for athletes. Many athletes are in situations in which their family is bereft of money and much of their stipends go to help their families because they cannot work and imagine that getting to the NFL is their way to support their family. Even for the average athlete, they will rely on their parents for much of their purchases made, but they will not learn anything about saving and spending money that will help them when they eventually begin to work on their own. The NCAA makes $872 million dollars with many of the higher ranked officials making in the millions of dollars. Some of this money is allocated bettering the NCAA with researches and activities for organizations, but the majority goes to the constant highest cost for a business. Labor, the people that work for the NCAA are collecting the most money, when student-athletes are struggling financially.

With that understood, the issue arises that the laborers at the lowest level are being abused for their talents and abilities. Those are the college football players, who are the entertainment that generates all of the income and continuity of college football. Students of top power five schools see this misconstrued idea of payment in a study by Raymond Schneider in a scholarly review study of the perceptions of college students on paying athletes. In the study, the results showed "Overall, 54% of all respondents believed student-athletes should be paid for intercollegiate athletics participation" (Schneider). This shows that even the students that do not play a sport generally understand that the students that do play sports, with the study being done with football and basketball, are deserving of payment for their athletics. The counter-argument that people use to the separation of money between the NCAA officials and the student athletes is the idea that college athletics is an amateur event and paying the athletes would create an environment more similar to a professional sport. This is an understood statement, but the work that the athletes do and the hours that are mandatory for the players creates a need for fair payment between the levels of bureaucracy in college athletics. There are many that oppose any type of payment for student-athletes and legal matters have occurred. The situation has been compiling as athletes begin to want to unionize to be represented as a player union. Now, "[a]fter years of debate and mounting legal pressure, the NCAA's dominant conferences agreed to start paying their players the difference between what they receive in scholarships and what it actually costs to attend a school" (Henry). The conversation in the legal matters are if college athletes are amateurs and if the hours that they dedicate to the university is compensated well enough by the scholarship and a free education with a meal plan and room and board. It has been ruled that the student-athletes deserve a stipend that compensates for some of the additional costs that are a part of going to that college. 

Continuing with the monetary argument, Skip Bayless, an ESPN analyst in a segment of the show ESPN First Take exclaims that student athletes should be able to acquire money from the NCAA, the teams, and boosters that represent the universities. He says that "their talents are a marketable skill that could get them money" (Brunette). As Bayless concurs that the NCAA is a big business, he believes that the athletes should be paid for the talents that they have and portfolio that they can create. Winning awards in high school like all-american honors and event all-academic honors that create a market for themselves as an athlete and an entity to better a university and generate money for the NCAA, the conference the school is in, and the school itself. This also does not include the positive externalities that benefit the city around the university and the state. The tens of thousands of people that come to power-five conference games all create a booming economy in the days surrounding a game or event and allow businesses to increase revenue exponentially every game situation that is played at home. Brian Frederick, a writer for the debate club understand that the amateurism of college athletics has been compromised for a while now. The author writes that "college athletics are just as much of a big business as professional sports -- it's just that the money goes into the pockets of coaches, athletic directors, conference commissioners and sports media executives" (Frederick). That is the greatest issue right now in college athletics that the employees are not being paid anything to create the revenue, but all the executives are being paid extraordinary amounts of money.

While the executives are the ones being paid, the athletes are the ones that put their bodies and their health on the line every time that the practice or play in a game. The question that the author creates is "How can a 'free education' compensate them for debilitating injuries caused during their time on campus?" College football is an extremely physically tolling sport and injuries are very prevalent in the field of play. There is a study that shows that sixty-seven percent of former athletes report to have had a major injury during college and fifty percent report to have had chronic injuries throughout their time in college This is compared to twenty-eight percent of non-athletes said that they had a major injury in college and twenty-six percent said they had chronic injuries during their experience in college (Preidt). This shows how much playing a college sport can affect a person's body and cause issues and complications later on in life. These issues cost money with insurance and medical bills that are direct costs that come from the time spent representing the university as a student-athlete. Without being paid during college and without getting a high level job right out of college, the athlete will have to pay for his medical bills either with the low paying job that college students, on average, will begin with coming out of college. This puts the athlete in a very difficult financial situation needing to rely on their parents and family if they have the means to pay it, until the legal age of getting your own medical insurance at the age of twenty-five. If the person's family is not financially secure enough to help pay the medical bills on the twenty-two-year-old graduate, then the person will either take worse medical advisement than necessary or neglect the health concerns and allow them to get much worse to eventual increased costs of bills and insurance. Research shows that "[d]ivision I athletes may sacrifice their future health-related quality of life for their brief athletic career in college" (Preidt). The dangers of college football can create life-long issues for the person and paying the athletes can help them with the expenses.

There are many other arguments though, that say student-athletes should not be paid. This argument begins by stating "The key in my statement is they shouldn't be paid, I didn't say they shouldn't be compensated". This author is a journalist for the Local Sports News and is updated on the situation on paying student athletes. The article continues with the major premise that states "[t]he average debt is $32,528 [for college graduates]. That is an enormous burden for kids who may, or may not have a job awaiting them upon graduation" (McCauley). This argument is invalid though, because of the opportunity that students get to have jobs and internships that give them a accelerated portfolio of things they have done that they can help them get jobs right out of college. The increased time that the students have to get relationships with executives and bosses in the field that they are interested in is increased without the time and dedication that comes with playing college football. Student athletes have also been argued against getting paid because the things that they do are a part of the letter of intent that they signed agreeing to come to the university and play the sport for an athletic scholarship.

Even though these student athletes agree to go to the school for the scholarship and agree to the rules and regulations of the university and the athletic program, many of them have no choice but to do this because they only other option is not to go to college and begin in a lower middle class blue collar job and possibly even a job for a wage and not a salary that makes starting a family and becoming successful much harder than the athlete that decides to go to school under the athletic scholarship and suffer through the experience without any actual representation or vote on the rules being passed that controls their life and future. This is the issue with private school Northwestern University and their attempt and success at unionizing and being employees in the eyes of the NCAA. The issue with this situation is "every school in the Big Ten, except Northwestern, is a state-run institution" (Farrey). This creates a situation where the other universities' players do not have the opportunity to unionize and develop a status of an employee and an entity that the NCAA with react to and negotiate with. The decision was upheld because "in the decision, the Board held that asserting jurisdiction would not promote labor stability due to the nature and structure of NCAA Division I Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS)". This is the response to the unfairness of the private school players having an additional opportunity at representation. This will not encourage more recruits to go to the school and make the universities' football team better and inevitably make more money for the university. This is the ruling by judge Claudia Wilken in O'Bannon v. NCAA, the court case that was summoned by the NCAA by not allowing Northwestern to unionize, but won by the student athletes of Northwestern. It was argued that "NCAA's bans on salary and revenue sharing [w]as unlawful restraints of trade under the Sherman Antitrust Act" (Tracy). That concluded the process of legalizing the unionization of private college football athletic institutions. 

The student-athletes are not able to make money off of their names and likenesses, which lead to the canceling of the NCAA college football and basketball video games. The NCAA as a non-profit general governing body for college football can make money off of the televised portrayal of these athletes' abilities and ticket, jersey, and concession sales. This is the argument for paying student athletes that they are not allowed to make money off of themselves and the NCAA and university is. Simply cancelling the video game is a very short-termed response to this issue and the conversation will have to continue. The best way for it to be resolved is just allowing the athletes to be paid for their name and likeness. This would induce booster and fan money as inhibited forms of payments to these college athletes and high school recruits. This allows the continuation of the fairness of recruiting and competitions that college amateurism presents. Each school is allowed free reign to pay how they want to whatever athletes they want. Now the athletes are fairly represented by their abilities and talents and are paid in a fair way that all athletes have to opportunity to receive.  

In conclusion, Division 1 power five conference athletes should be paid for their name, likeness and talents. They have additional costs that are not covered by the scholarship and need the additional payment to pay for other basic utilities that the athletic scholarship does not cover. These athletes have worked hard to become what they are and can have that taken away from them at any time. The possible health issues that athletes face everyday can last their whole life and be a constant financial reminded of the time that they spent playing college football. Very few student athletes make it to the NFL and the ones that do not have worked so hard at one goal for a lifetime and are now put in a situation where they have never worked in their life and now have to find a job and start a life and a man in the business world. This all should not be a problem too with the millions of dollars that the NCAA generates every year, as well as the power five conferences that intake millions of dollars too. Paying college athletes is beneficial to the lives of these student athletes and will help solve the issue that the NCAA is facing of athletic compensation and payment to student athletes for the multitude of hours of work that each college football player does.

