Recently, Dave Berri, the author of Wages of Wins wrote a piece on freakonomics.com about salaries in college sports. As the article states, in 2008, the National Collegiate Athletics Association (NCAA) collected an astonishing $4.4 billion of revenue. In the state of New Hampshire, the University of New Hampshire hockey coach Dick Umile is the highest paid state employee. Even considering all of this, college players aren't paid to play, which has become a widely debated topic in recent years.
People against paying athletes often site two main arguments: some college's can't afford paying athletes, only further distorting competitive balance, and athlete's are already payed through scholarships. I don't think the first point is valid. As Berri states, college coaching salaries are ridiculously high. Nick Saban, the football coach at the University of Alabama makes $5.62 million per season, while two time super bowl champion Tom Coughlin of the Giants makes $5.25. The reason that colleges pay their coaches so much is because they don't have to pay the students, and the front office. If college players started being paid, the coaches salaries would simply go down. Also, the current college system doesn't foster competitive balance anyway. All the top players commit to the top schools that are already financially capable of giving them a scholarship.
The people in favor of paying players point to how much revenue these players are generating for the university. These people argue that the university shouldn't be able to profit so much off of these students while they don't see any of it. Another possible positive of paying players, is it would provide an incentive for staying in school longer before going pro.
Personally, I don't think athletes should be paid. Clearly, different athletes generate different amounts of revenue for the school. The star quarterback is going to bring in more than someone on the bench. Getting colleges into bidding wars for teenagers could be a slippery slope. Getting a free education in itself is a lot of money. Also, two sports (football, and basketball) are generating most of the revenue for the NCAA. Only compensating athletes in these two sports would be unfair, but at the same time, many sports are already losing money. Paying these athletes would only exacerbate this problem.
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