Those driving forward the movement of paying college athletes are forgetting the reason one goes to college: to get an education.
In an era struggling for competitive balance, how would the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) keep from giving schools like Kentucky and Alabama even more of a competitive advantage than schools like Valparaiso and Florida Gulf Coast? The issue gets complicated when taking into consideration how the salary difference between different teams gets decided.
Even worse, imagine athletes just coming to college for the money. We call college athletes amateurs. Oxford's definition of amateur is "a person who engages in a pursuit, especially a sport, on an unpaid basis. " The keyword is unpaid. The history of the word " amateur" dates back to the French word "amator", which means lover. Essentially, college athletes should be playing their sport for the love of the game, not the money that would be given to them.
Rules should not be made for the minority, and in this instance only two percent of athletes play professional sports. The expected career span of that two percent is 10 years, three and a half years in the National Football League (NFL). An astonishing 80 percent of retired NFL players go broke within three years of retirement ,60 percent in the NBA within five years. This is why the NCAA and its member institutions should apply a "stay and learn", rule.
This rule should state that if athletes choose to come to college, they will get paid in scholarships that last the entire educational process and the athlete must stay in school until they earn a degree in the area of study they choose. That money from going professional is going to run out sometime, but the degree will always be there.
Look at college athletics for what it is and should always be, a high-pressure learning environment and an avenue to earn an education. A much more fun extension of the classroom if you will. After all, they are called student-athletes.
