Should college athletes be employees of their universities?

I made an Olympic team off the back of my college program: the pool, the coaches, the sports medicine, the training table. Team USA's pipeline runs through college athletics in swimming, track, gymnastics, wrestling. Turn those programs into employers with payroll obligations and half of them disappear, especially the non-revenue ones that produce Olympians. The Olympics don't pay for development. Colleges do, as a side effect of the current model. Break the model and you break the pipeline that puts Americans on podiums. Employment might help the quarterback. It ends the career of the steeplechaser before it starts.