Should NCAA athletes be paid?

Student-athletes should receive a stipend

Question: Should NCAA athletes be paid?
Position1 of 2›: NCAA athletes should be paid
Argument1 of 2›: Student-athletes should receive a stipend

An athletic scholarship only covers room and board and the cost of tuition, leaving athletes to fend for themselves when it comes to money for extra expenses.

The argument

On the surface level, athletic scholarships seem great, but there are tons of costs that they don't cover. A scholarship is written against tuition and the formal costs of attending, which leaves the ordinary expenses of living exactly where they fall. Student fees, extra food, and money for laundry may seem like small expenses, but to a student-athlete, they can be financial burdens — not because the sums are large in isolation, but because they recur every week and nothing in the arrangement anticipates them. What makes the shortfall hard to close is the schedule rather than the amount. Student-athletes devote so much time to their athletic and academic careers that they don't have much time to get a job and make extra money when they need it. Training, travel, competition and coursework occupy the hours in which other students earn, so the usual remedy for a student who is short of money is unavailable precisely to those whose obligations to their institution are greatest. The scholarship covers the costs the university charges, while the commitments the university imposes prevent the athlete from covering the rest. A stipend addresses that gap directly. It would help alleviate some of these burdens by giving them money for the things they need — whether it be food or clean clothes — without requiring hours the athlete does not have to give. The proposal is deliberately modest: it is not a salary, nor a share of the revenue an athlete helps to generate, but a payment scaled to the everyday costs of being a student while carrying an athlete's timetable. For these reasons, every student-athlete should receive a stipend in addition to their athletic scholarships, if any.

Premises

[P1]Athletic scholarships do not cover many real costs of student life, such as student fees, extra food, and laundry. [P2] Student-athletes' demanding schedules leave them little time to earn money through outside work. [C] Therefore, NCAA athletes should be paid in the form of a stipend to cover these unmet needs.

Counter-arguments

Paying stipends may lead to more corruption or an unequal playing field when schools recruit players. It may result in the best players going to the school with the biggest stipend payments, causing NCAA games to be incredibly mismatched.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] The unmet costs identified — fees, extra food, laundry — make a case for scholarships that cover the full cost of attendance, an allowance many programmes already provide, rather than for paying athletes as such. [Rejecting P2] Demanding schedules are not peculiar to athletes: students holding music, academic or service scholarships carry comparable loads without a stipend. And because schools compete for recruits, stipends set school by school would not remain the uniform welfare measure the argument describes — the amounts would become part of the recruiting offer.