Taylor Branch’s cover story in the October 2011 issue of The Atlantic, “The Shame of College Sports,” makes the most persuasive case to date for paying college athletes–or at least breaking the NCAA’s iron grip on their property rights. Now Wharton’s Ken Shropshire, the David W. Hauck Professor, chimes in. Branch is right, he says—and the difficulty of figuring out how college athletes should get paid is no excuse for inaction.
“There is no reason not to focus efforts on figuring out how to redistribute the profits to labor, because if you are basing the nonpayment on some vision of ancient Greeks celebrating amateurism, you are wrong,” Shropshire states. Read the rest of his thoughts here.
Maybe all athletes could receive the same stipend each month for playing their respective sport. I agree that there will be difficulty deciding who gets paid what but student athletes are in need of financial assistance. I know some argue that the scholarship athletes receive should be payment enough but not every player on a team has a scholarship. Some actually walk on a team so this rationale is not acceptable to me.