Paying student-athletes would result in other programs being cut

The argument

Schools do not have the money to pay student-athletes without cutting other programs, and that constraint is what makes the proposal self-defeating for the athletes it is meant to help. The revenue is concentrated in a small number of places. The biggest revenue streams in the NCAA are men's basketball and football, and those two sports carry the finances of the athletic department they sit in. For various reasons, women's sports are far less popular and have a smaller fan base, which results in them being less profitable for both the NCAA and the schools. The same is true of less-watched sporting events like track and swimming. Under the present arrangement this asymmetry is invisible to the athletes, because the money earned by the largest programs quietly underwrites the ones that do not pay for themselves. Mandating that student-athletes be paid removes that cross-subsidy. A new and substantial cost is imposed across every program, but the money to meet it exists in only a few of them, and schools simply do not have the funds to implement the change while keeping all their programs. Something has to be closed, and the programs that are closed will be the ones that cannot show a return — which is to say most women's programs and the smaller sports. The outcome is therefore a transfer rather than a gain. Athletes in the revenue sports would be paid; athletes in the others would lose the chance to compete at all, since a cut program does not merely pay less, it ceases to exist. Set against a scholarship and a place on a team, that is a poor trade. NCAA athletes should not be paid, on this view, precisely because the payment would be funded out of other athletes' opportunity to play at a collegiate level.

Premises

Counter-arguments

While the money to pay players will have to come from somewhere, there are better solutions than cutting athletic programs. For one, some coaches are paid up to 9.3 million dollars per year. Taking just $300,000 from that figure and allotting it to that schools' athletes would leave the coach with $9 million and give all student-athletes a sense of financial security.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] "Schools do not have the money" is stated rather than shown, and it sits awkwardly beside what the same athletic departments sustain: large facility programmes and coaching salaries that are frequently the highest public-sector salary in the state. A budget that cannot absorb athlete pay without cuts is one in which those items have been ranked above it, which is a choice rather than an impossibility, and the counter puts a number to the point. [Rejecting P2] The premise assumes payment must come out of each school's own athletic budget. It need not. Athletes can be compensated by third parties for the use of their name, image and likeness with no transfer from the school at all, and any revenue share can be structured to scale with the revenue a given sport generates rather than drawn from a fixed pool. [Rejecting P3] The conclusion also passes over a legal constraint. Where institutions receive federal funding, the equitable-treatment requirements governing athletic programmes limit the selective elimination of women's sports, so "the less profitable ones will be cut" is not the unconstrained choice the premise assumes.