Should college athletes be employees of their universities?

I work in HR, and if any other employer described this arrangement I would laugh them out of the room. Mandatory 5 AM workouts, film sessions, travel schedules set by someone else, position coaches monitoring your weight and your sleep, transfer restrictions that functioned as non-competes until about five minutes ago. That's a job with a very controlling boss. The NLRB already saw it. In February 2024, a regional director ruled that Dartmouth's men's basketball players are employees under the National Labor Relations Act, and the team voted to unionize the next month. The legal test is control plus compensation, and big-time college athletics clears both bars easily. People keep treating this as a philosophy question. It's a labor classification question, and we already know the answer. National Labor Relations Board