Eileen Bell

Should college athletes be employees of their universities?

Here's the math nobody on the pay-the-players side wants to do. Only about 20 to 25 athletic departments in the country actually turn a profit. The other 300-plus lose money, subsidized by student fees and university funds. If football and basketball players become employees with salaries, benefits, and bargaining rights, where does that money come from? It comes from cutting the sports that don't generate revenue. Title IX complicates it further: you can't just pay the men's teams and call it a day. So the bill roughly doubles, and the first casualties are swimming, wrestling, track, gymnastics, the sports where athletes compete for the love of it and the scholarship is genuinely life-changing. We would be trading opportunity for hundreds of thousands of athletes to give salaries to a few thousand, most of whom chose schools that already pay them plenty in NIL money. That's a strange definition of progress. [NCAA finances data](https://www.ncaa.org)

Local news is dying in plain sight and the ad-tech monopoly is a big reason why. When one company runs the auction and bids in it, publishers cannot win. Splitting the exchange from the ad business is the minimum honest fix.

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Bureaucracy is also what guarantees the check arrives. Discretionary bonuses have a long history of shrinking whenever budgets tighten, and they never shrink equally.

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