College student athletes should be paid.  The NCAA is a multi-millionaire business, and yet the NCAA still will not pay the student athletes.  Some football, and basketball teams are worth over $500,000-$1,000,000, yet the NCAA can not pay these athletes money to even get something as simple as food. With about 86% of college athletes living under the poverty line they barely have enough money to do anything that involves money.

During the 2018 March Madness tournament the NCAA made a total of $900 million dollars in three weeks of the tournament. People can also gamble on these march madness games, and there was about $9.2 billion dollars gambled on the outcomes of the games. This doesn’t make any sense to me. The fact that they can put money and gamble on the games outcome and yet the players still can’t make any money whatsoever. If you don’t want the athletes to be paid then there shouldn’t be any type of gambling on the games.

The NCAA makes billions of dollars from athletics every single year. These players have a job basically. They wake up at the crack of dawn for most sports get a workout in and then they go to class and then they have another workout later that night. Sometimes they won’t get done with practice after 9:00 or 10:00 o’clock at night, and they go back to there dorm room and are expected to do all of their school work on top of there athletics.

The students who go to college on athletic scholarships are not allowed to have any type of job outside of the sport they are playing. Meanwhile if you are on an academic scholarship you are allowed to have a job, and make money to help pay off your college funds.  Not to mention if you get injured while playing your sport your scholarship could possibly revoked. So whenever you are injured you don’t have any money to pay for your medical bills because you can’t have a job whenever you are on scholarship.

According to The Guardian, some of the top tier college football coaches get paid between $4 million to $6 million dollars per year. That is just their salary. That does not include the money from outside fees. These top tier college football coaches are the highest paid employees in 40 out of 50 states. Some coaches obviously get paid differently from other coaches because of what sport they coach, but the fact that some college football coaches are getting paid up to $6 million dollars per year is absolutely absurd. Yet, college athletes still can not get paid.

According to The Guardian, some apologists have done studies that have shown that an athletic scholarship would be around $50,000-$125,00 per year. I personally don’t think that it would be fair to pay the athletes that much money, but it would be a lot easier if the college athletes were allowed to have jobs while on campus or do something to earn money outside of school. At the end of the day college athletes should be able to receive some type of money.