NCAA athletes shouldn’t be paid to go to school

In the wake of the NCAA men's basketball tournament, a debate started about whether student-athletes at Div. 1 schools deserve pay for their contributions to their schools. Television contracts, free apparel and equipment, merchandise sales and ticket sales in men's D1 football and basketball make up a multibillion dollar industry. The more competitive schools generate large incomes to recruit even more talented players or to build that new stadium they "need" so badly.

In return, these student athletes get free or heavily reduced tuition to some of the best schools in the country, along with great medical care, meals, housing and access to the best training facilities known to man. Now, some prominent people, such as Ohio State University Athletic Director Gene Smith, are saying it's not enough. In an interview with USA Today, Smith said athletes could use extra money for clothing, gas money, furnishing apartments and "simply going out." Another advocate of paying student athletes is ESPN analyst and former college basketball star Jalen Rose, who wrote an article for the Huffington Post last month contending that collegiate athletes should be given a stipend of $2,000 per semester to keep up with the cost of living.

It sounds fair enough when one considers how much revenue college athletics bring in for these schools, but is it ethical to pay college athletes for an extracurricular activity that should come after schoolwork? The line between professional and collegiate athletes is becoming incredibly blurred by institutions which, at least nominally, put academic excellence first on their list of priorities. At the University of Georgia 73.5 percent of athletes were special admits, meaning they did not meet the traditional academic requirements for enrollment at the school, compared to a mere 6.6 percent among the general student population, according to a study at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. That same study found that D1 colleges with the highest admission standards, such as Georgia Tech and UCLA, had the biggest gaps between SAT averages for athletes and the rest of the student body.

I'm not implying athletes are stupid. Some of the smartest people I've known have been athletically talented, but scholarships should be given to scholars, not people biding their time until they are drafted into the pros. There needs to be stricter academic standards for athletes to compete. Many of these athletes need to stop taking for granted their admission into some of the best universities in the country because the reality is many of them won't go pro. Then, they'll be stuck with a degree in some blow-off major, unable to succeed in the world outside sports.

If athletes receive a cut from the sale of their jerseys or free shoes from Nike, that's fine. But colleges should not pay their athletes for the prestige they bring to the school any more than we are paid for the high average ACT scores and GPA's Truman uses as a sales pitch for prospective students. That is to say, they should receive nothing more than the already incredible benefits of their scholarships to prestigious schools.

There is something to be said for amateurism in collegiate sports, something much more inspirational than what we've developed over the last few decades. The situation is not dissimilar from the Olympics, where the medals seem to convey so much more when you found out that the person on the podium was an electrician or a school teacher in the real world. We've lost sight of that in our crusade for harder, faster and bigger in the world of college athletics, and maybe it's time to see a star quarterback or point guard with a degree in bio-chemistry or classical literature instead of the future first round draft pick that's just killing time before they go pro.       

Connor Riley is a junior  history major from St. Louis, Mo.