I don't know about that, I mean most state governments give colleges a wage and they blow it all on gigantic football stadiums instead of concentrating on education. Cuz ya know, college and all. If the colleges are making extra money on sports, so should the players.
As someone actually working in public education (and also working on my degree on the side, bless up for those staff scholarships), our state-funded budgets are generally hilariously underfunded relative to our needs, and sporting value projects. That’s why our tuition is so high: we genuinely need that money and we still refuse to pay most of our faculty adequately. Junior faculty are comically underpaid nationwide; graduate student assistants, either RAs or TAs, aren’t actually paid a living wage anywhere in the nation that I’m aware of except for, ironically, SMU; and we constantly trap new PhDs who want to teach into teaching as adjuncts rather than hiring them as faculty and giving them benefits. California and West Virginia are, quite literally, the only states that have public university systems that are funded with the ostensible goal of keeping yearly tuition costs manageable for someone working full time, and WVU had to prioritize their mandate to serve an underserved population over their academic standing.
Stadiums are generally funded by donor gifts and fundraising campaigns and, occasionally, special set-aside bond campaigns from the municipality. As a general rule, football and MBB are the only revenue sports at the university level, and hence their often-minimal revenues fund all of a school’s non-revenue sports that are necessary due to Title IX scholarship equivalencies, along with university funds for yearly program costs and salaries. Coach salaries are absolutely too high though, I’m on oard with that.
Title IX requires that, for every scholarship a school gives to a men’s team player, one must also be given to a women’s team player (although not necessarily in the same sport, that’s why we don’t have women’s football teams). This is why there tend to be more womens’ sports teams at most schools, like soccer and A&T: they’re where the womens’ team scholarships go that are necessary to balance out the 85 scholarships given to a D1-FBS football team. If each team’s revenues go back into the programs that generate them to compensate the athletes, a whole lot of men’s and women’s teams are going to get cut, probably to the extent that it’s the football program that gets eyes and helps as a student-recruiting tool, maybe the basketball program depending on whether or not it’s profitable, and then just barely enough low-cost women’s sports to even out the 85 football scholarships and the 15 MBB scholarships.
That said, giving athletes NIL access is a good solution to this that absolutely should’ve been granted long ago. It allows the athletes to take their compensation from the university in the form of their tuition, room, and board that have all long been covered by the university, and then to make extra money on the side as-needed due to licensing their names and likenesses.
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u/[deleted] Apr 23 '21
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