Blake McKay

Should college athletes be classified as employees with salaries and benefits?

Only about two dozen athletic departments in Division I turn a profit. The other 300-plus subsidize sports with student fees and university funds. If football and basketball players become employees with salaries and benefits, the math is brutal: schools will cut the sports that lose money. That means swimming, wrestling, gymnastics, track, and most women's sports outside basketball. Title IX requires equal opportunity, but equal employee payrolls across dozens of teams would bankrupt mid-major programs overnight. The [NCAA](https://www.ncaa.org/) reports more than 500,000 athletes compete across its divisions. Employee status might enrich a few thousand stars in revenue sports and eliminate opportunities for hundreds of thousands of others. That trade is not progress.

I feel both sides. Dark winter mornings with kids at bus stops genuinely scare me, but losing summer evenings would hurt too. Maybe the real lesson is that any fixed time makes someone unhappy.

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