Student athletes should be paid by outside sources

 

 

UK is one of only 19 athletics programs that generates revenue (expenses + subsidy). College sports are not the huge cash cow some people think they are. Rarely are any sports profitable to a university other than football and men’s basketball.

Despite being profitable, UK Athletics still gets nearly a million dollars annually in subsidies paid for by student fees.

The idea that players get exploited is very overblown. Sometimes players are taken advantage of, but the John Walls and Cam Newtons are few and far between.

None of this mattered last week when the “Power Five” conferences of the NCAA, which UK is a part of, voted to provide stipends between $2,000 to $4,000 per year to student athletes.

So the debate is over, players will get paid — but it will be students cutting the checks.

This will not be limited to just a few players, recruiting is too competitive. It won’t be long until the school offers four grand a year to every basketball and football player they meet.

Our nationally dominant cheerleading squad will need to pay their athletes to stay on top too. Other sports will find a player they cannot live without and that player will get paid too.

Scholarship athletes already have it good enough, and paying students are already getting the shaft. Out-of-state tuition at UK runs about $23 thousand per year.

Add to that books, five-star resorts we tell ourselves are dorms to keep from getting depressed, and a personal chef and these “exploited” athletes who are firmly in the middle class — living better than most STEM graduates in today’s job market.

The money these students make above what they already get in benefits goes toward providing scholarships to the rest of the student athletes who actually have to struggle to get through. If the school starts paying athletes they will either go bankrupt, or cut out the education opportunity for most college athletes.

Paying students already have it tough enough. Government support for schools is at an all-time low. State support for UK was less than 10 percent of the budget for the first time ever this year.

This means more of the tuition has to come out of students’ pockets, and the job market after graduation is, at best, struggling. All of the construction projects on campus cost so much that a very generous $20 million donation from Bill Gatton will only cut student fees by $25 per semester.

And Title IX mandates that every male athlete given a benefit must be matched by a female athlete, so that doubles the cost.

The arguments for paying college athletes sound desperately close to those made for cutting taxes on the rich. It’s an emotional appeal that makes sense on the surface, but in practice only hurts everyone else.

Players should get paid, just not by the university. If Gatorade wants to slap sophomore guards Aaron and Andrew Harrison on an ad, let them get $1 million each for it.

If junior forward Willie Cauley-Stein wants to sign some of those free shoes athletes get and sell them, by all means go for it, that shouldn’t be a problem. The problem is that the only conversation happening revolves around students paying them.

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