Sporting Sweatshops: The Wins and Losses of Being a “Student-Athlete”
BY HENRY KOPESKY
Football is a game of numbers: 100 yards from end zone to end zone, six points for a touchdown, three timeouts in each half, four quarters of fifteen minutes each. Sometimes, we fans argue over the numbers, over whether a penalty should move a team back five or ten yards, or if a statistic should be erased from the official record book. At the end of the day, though, all these numbers are made up. They only exist in the stadium, on the field where they are the law of the land, the unyielding dicta that govern the world. Once the game is over and the fans have gone back to their tailgates and hangovers, the numbers all disappear. Except for one.
$0. Nothing. Zero. That’s how much money is in a college athlete’s pocket at the end of each game. Even though the college sports industry is worth $10 billion, nearly twice the GDP of the entire nation of Liechtenstein, players do not see a dime of that money. In recent months, the first steps toward the legal recognition of players’ right to a salary have been taken by athletes at Northwestern University. It appears that some form of player compensation is on the horizon, if you look far enough ahead.
But should it be? At the risk of sounding like a Pinkerton apologist, perhaps it’s not necessary for players to have collective bargaining rights. Barely 10 percent of public Division I athletic departments are self-sustaining, while the rest receive some level of support from their parent institution; at private universities, the numbers are almost certainly lower. In other words, some 90 percent of large, public athletic programs do not generate enough revenue to survive on their own. If athletes were employees in such a foundering “company,” then surely they would be subject to termination or the wholesale elimination of their division of the firm, as is the case for any other employee in the business world. The truth is that most Division I (to say nothing of less-endowed Division II and III) athletic departments cannot sustain themselves, and that’s without having to shell out thousands or millions of dollars to their athletes. If those costs were suddenly added to universities’ ledgers, the effect on college athletics would be catastrophic; nonrevenue sports, traditionally propped up by football and men’s basketball, would disappear or lose funding overnight. Today’s amateur athletic ecosystem is, fittingly enough, built on a foundation of amateurism.
If the numbers work against the monetary compensation of players, what do they say about the overall value of a college degree? Beginning in 2011, the North Carolina newspaper The News & Observer began investigating claims that University of North Carolina student-athletes had received improperly high grades in their classes there. One professor in particular, Julius Nyang’oro, was accused of teaching classes that never met and required a single short paper. Dr. Nyang’oro has since been indicted for fraud, though the problem apparently reached far beyond his classroom to dozens of other courses. These recent revelations about the University of North Carolina’s grading standards cast doubt on whether student-athletes are being paid a fair wage in the form of free tuition and housing, and whether those benefits are actually worth the work they dedicate to their sport. After all, if an athlete can succeed in college without attending class and graduate without any marketable skills, what was college but a four-year stint in semi-professional athletics without the meager pay? If students truly do not benefit at all from attending college, then the NCAA and its member institutions have built $10 billion in revenue on the bedrock of uncompensated labor.
Although it is exceedingly difficult to accurately measure the value added to student-athletes’ careers by college, a study published in 2001 by James Shulman examined separate groups of male athletes who had participated in sports at various levels during their college careers. The findings of his study were surprising: in all of Shulman’s measured groups, former college athletes earned significantly higher salaries than their counterparts who had been regular students. For men’s athletics at colleges and universities of many sizes, this difference was notable: by the end of their careers, former participants in men’s sports made an average of $10,000 more than their counterparts who had not participated in athletics. This disparity could be plausibly explained away by arguing that the one or two percent of college athletes who are selected to play professional sports drag the mean salary up throughout their careers, by way of their contracts, endorsements, and other athletics-related income. The proportion of former athletes who remain relevant enough to earn money from their past fame is miniscule, however, and would hardly comprise a difference that amounts to roughly ten percent of a non-athlete’s peak salary.
The reality that “going pro in something other than sports,” in the words of the NCAA, is very profitable to student athletes is evident when one examines women’s sports. Very few female athletes make a substantial salary; in fact, top WNBA players make a mere $101,000, while rookies’ salaries are often below $40,000. The average salary in the NWSL, the latest iteration of women’s professional soccer in the United States, is a shocking $15,000. Clearly, then, female athletes do not make the astronomical salaries that their male counterparts are paid. Yet, the same pay disparity between former athletes that existed with men persists with women, to an even greater degree. Though the nominal difference between former athletes’ and non-athletes’ salaries was only $7,000, the difference in pay, adjusted for their chosen professional field, was even more dramatic than that of male former athletes.
Of course, there are reasons to believe this difference may no longer be as significant. Could college degrees now be worth even less than those earned 25, 40, or 60 years ago by those who are at the end of their careers today? It is certainly possible. The commercialization of athletics has considerably heightened the pressure on athletic departments to create a winning program, pressure which has translated into scandal upon academic scandal. Whether that is the case or not, however, the best data we have seem to suggest that the degrees granted to student-athletes are far from worthless.
Whether or not athletes receive a meaningful education in college, is there really a point to forbidding them from receiving the fruit of their labor? A recent piece of investigative blogging, published on SBNation.com by Steven Godfrey, details the extent to which many major universities already pay their players. During the recruiting process, before an athlete has even played a single snap or scored a single point, goal, basket, or run for a school, they have often received tens of thousands of dollars from multiple schools vying for their talents. Although these payments are not sanctioned by the players’ respective universities, does it really matter? Money, on the order of millions of dollars, has already corrupted major college athletics, and has been polluting the virgin “amateur” system for decades; that money’s source does not matter in the least. Once a player has been paid, he or she is no longer an amateur, and the NCAA’s prohibition on professionalism becomes all the more ridiculous.
Still, where does the money to pay players come from? Most athletic departments are already strapped for cash; asking them to pay players would be akin to demanding a subsidy from taxpayers for the athletics industry. This proposition is utterly ridiculous: subsidies are (or should be) reserved for industries vital to the economic health of the United States, not superfluous entertainment industries in which executives (in this case, coaches and athletic directors) are paid millions of dollars each year. Allowing players to accept cash or other benefits in exchange for endorsements, a simple reward for the hard work and image-maintenance demanded from college athletes, hardly compromises universities’ budgets.
When I started the process of writing this article, I wanted to demonize the NCAA and universities around the country. It was my intent to embrace exploited college kids, embrace the basic right of people to be compensated for what they do. This desire was based on my conception of former NCAA athletes that depicted them as under-educated and unprepared for life after college (or, more importantly, life after sports, especially given the miniscule portion of college athletes who go pro). It is difficult, however, to square that viewpoint with the reality that the hard work of athletes in college translates to higher salaries in the future. It seems, then, that colleges and athletes exist in a symbiotic relationship. Perhaps nobody is a true villain in college athletics; perhaps neither players and their proponents nor universities and their apologists are exactly right or wrong.
Even if players are not entitled to a weekly paycheck, maybe their right to collective bargaining is not superfluous. It could be, for instance, that collective bargaining may be an effective way to ensure that student-athletes are given all the medical treatment they need and deserve, or that endorsement deals given to individual players would be partitioned between the players and their team. What collective bargaining should not and cannot do, however, is try to squeeze money from the universities. The ultimate goal of college athletics should always be to foster a university’s sense of community and institutional integrity, never to undermine it.