Graduate teaching assistants won employee status decades ago, and nobody claimed it destroyed the university. They teach classes, grade papers, and get paychecks, benefits, and unions. A starting quarterback works longer hours, generates more revenue, and faces greater physical risk, yet is told a scholarship is enough. Courts have already moved: the NLRB regional director ruled Dartmouth basketball players are employees, and the House settlement effectively conceded players deserve a share of revenue. Employee classification does not mean every swimmer gets rich. It means labor law applies: minimum wage floors, safety standards, and the right to bargain. We do not ask whether the chemistry department makes money before granting TAs workplace rights. Stop asking it about athletes.
Should college athletes be classified as employees with salaries and benefits?
The roughly $2.8 billion House v. NCAA settlement and the Dartmouth men's basketball union vote have forced the question of whether college athletes are employees entitled to salaries and benefits.
The cases
For (3)
I was a college soccer player, and my senior year I tore my ACL in a conference semifinal. The school covered the surgery, but the rehab schedule, the lost summer internship, and the chronic knee pain at 30 were mine to keep. Employees get workers' compensation when they are hurt doing their job. College athletes get hurt doing exactly their job and then get told the scholarship was the compensation. The NLRB's general counsel said in a 2021 memo that scholarship athletes at private schools meet the legal definition of employees. The Dartmouth men's basketball team voted to unionize in March 2024. Employee status is not about turning campuses into pro franchises. It is about a 20-year-old with a spinal injury not begging for an MRI.
The numbers ended the amateurism debate before the lawyers did. The NCAA signed tournament TV deals worth billions while the athletes generating the product got cost-of-attendance stipends. The House settlement approved in June 2025 sends about $2.8 billion in back damages to former athletes and lets schools share up to $20.5 million per year directly with players, according to NCAA announcements. If a university can pay a football coach $10 million a year from revenue the players produce, calling those players 'student-athletes' instead of employees is a legal fiction. Employees get minimum wage, workers' comp, and a union voice. College athletes get concussions and a pat on the back. Classify them as employees and the fiction ends.
Against (5)
Employee status comes with a tax bill nobody mentions. Right now athletic scholarships are generally not treated as taxable income. The moment athletes become employees, the scholarship, the housing, the meal plan, the tutoring, all of it starts to look like compensation, and the IRS taxes compensation. A swimmer on a $60,000 scholarship could owe thousands in federal taxes on money she never saw, which is a strange way to help college athletes. The IRS rules on scholarships already draw careful lines here, and employment blows past them. The stars with NIL millions can absorb it. The rower from Ohio cannot. Revenue sharing under the House settlement delivers money without reclassifying anyone. NCAA. Employee status delivers a W-2 and a tax bill to the athletes it claims to rescue.
Employees can be fired. That is the part nobody puts on the poster. The moment athletes become university employees, the four-year scholarship becomes an at-will job, and coaches gain the power every employer has: cut the underperformer. Today a school that pulls a scholarship for athletic reasons faces outrage and, in the Power conferences, rules guaranteeing multi-year aid. Make the player an employee and the third-string linebacker with a bad knee is a layoff, not a tragedy. The NLRB framework the Dartmouth players used is real labor law, with management rights included. NLRB. Athletes would gain bargaining rights and lose the paternalistic protections that currently keep them on scholarship when they stop producing. For the stars, that trade might pay. For the 98 percent who will never go pro, trading guaranteed aid for the right to be terminated is a catastrophic bargain.
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 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.
Employee status sounds simple until you administer it. Are athletes employees of the university, the conference, or the NCAA? Who pays unemployment insurance when a senior graduates? Do transfer portal moves trigger labor disputes? What happens to international athletes whose visas forbid employment? The Dartmouth vote applied to one Ivy League basketball team; scaling that ruling to 500,000 athletes across 1,100 schools with different state labor laws is a compliance nightmare. Workers' comp alone would be staggering in football. And collective bargaining at public universities runs into state laws that vary wildly, some banning public-employee strikes entirely. The House settlement's revenue-sharing model already delivers pay without detonating the legal framework. Employee classification promises fairness and delivers a decade of lawsuits.
My daughter plays Division III softball. No TV money, no NIL deals, just a sport she loves and a degree she is earning. Classifying athletes as employees turns every roster spot into a labor decision: schools will carry fewer players, cut walk-ons, and treat the third-string catcher as a cost center. The classroom relationship matters too. Professors already navigate awkward dynamics with athletes; making them university employees with HR files deepens the divide between athlete-workers and regular students. NIL rights since 2021 already let stars earn real money, with some quarterbacks signing deals worth millions, as covered by the Associated Press. Let the market pay the marketable through NIL and revenue sharing. Do not reclassify the entire system and crush the 98 percent who just want to compete and graduate.