Should college athletes be employees of their universities?

I spent 14 years on the college football sidelines. I hate to admit it but I've cleared kids to go back in with concussions because our protocols allowed it, and I have watched some of our former linemen in their post college life struggle to remember their kids names. Things like that keep me up at night. When a player's eligibility ends, the university's responsibility ends. No long-term care, no monitoring and no coverage for the brain injuries sustained generating the school's TV money. An employee hurt on the job gets workers comp and ongoing medical coverage. But a lot of college athlete gets four years of nice treatment and then a lifetime of bills. Boston University's CTE Center has found CTE in hundreds of former football players, most of whom never played a snap professionally. If the damage happens on the university's field, on the university's schedule, the university should carry the cost like any other employer.

Follow the money and the amateurism argument collapses. The College Football Playoff's media deal is worth roughly $1.3 billion a year, the Big Ten's TV contracts approach a billion annually, and head coaches at top programs make $8 to $11 million a year. The players generating that product? Until NIL, they got tuition, a stipend, and a stern lecture about gratitude. The NCAA spent decades insisting this was about education while operating one of the most lucrative entertainment businesses in America on unpaid labor. Then the Supreme Court ruled unanimously against the NCAA in Alston in 2021, and Justice Kavanaugh wrote that the NCAA's business model would be "flatly illegal in almost any other industry in America." He was right. If a 19-year-old works 40-hour weeks under a coach's total control, wears the company uniform, and generates millions in revenue, every labor law in the country calls that an employee. The only industry with an exemption is the one that invented the word "student-athlete" to dodge workers' comp claims in the 1950s. Supreme Court: NCAA v. Alston

My college head coach left for an NFL job in the middle of a recruiting cycle. No penalty that mattered, just a bigger check. But when my teammate wanted to transfer closer to his sick mother, he had to sit out an entire year. The portal fixed some of that, but the principle stands: coaches have always been free agents and players were property with homework. Now that players can finally move, everyone acts shocked that college football looks professional. It looks professional because it's professional. Paying salaries just admits what the transfer portal, the TV deals, and the coaching carousel already proved. You can't run a free labor market for coaches and a company store for players and call it amateurism with a straight face.

The debate is already half over and most people missed it. The House v. NCAA settlement, approved in 2025, lets schools share revenue directly with athletes: up to about $20.5 million per school per year to start, rising from there. That's a salary cap in everything but name. Schools are already cutting checks to players for playing football. So the question is no longer whether athletes get paid. They do. The question is whether we give them the legal protections that come with pay: minimum standards, bargaining rights, injury coverage, a say in the conditions of their work. Right now they have the money without the rights, which is the worst of both worlds: all of the commercialization, none of the leverage. Calling them employees just makes the law catch up to the transaction everyone can already see. NCAA

Forget salaries for a second. The real prize in the Dartmouth case is collective bargaining. A players' union could negotiate caps on practice hours, guaranteed multi-year scholarships, real health insurance, and a share of media revenue, all at the bargaining table instead of begging the NCAA. That's how every other American industry handles the power imbalance between labor and management. The NLRB ruling opened that door. Coaches have agents negotiating their contracts. Athletic directors have lawyers. Players have compliance officers telling them what they can't do. A union fixes the asymmetry, and employment status is the key that unlocks it.

I played two years of D1 soccer before my knee ended it, and here's what employee status would have changed for me: everything after the injury. The school's surgeon did the ACL repair, the rehab was in their facility, and the day I was medically disqualified, the support evaporated. I was 20, limping through campus, paying out of pocket for follow-up PT because the "coverage" ended when my roster spot did. An employee gets workers' compensation. An employee gets continued medical care for a workplace injury. A "student-athlete" gets a thank-you and a highlight reel. Nobody disputes that a warehouse worker who blows out a knee on the job deserves care. The only reason we treat the athlete differently is a label the NCAA invented. My knee doesn't know the difference.

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

Minor-league baseball players are employees. Under the 2023 collective bargaining agreement their minimum salaries run from about $19,800 at the lowest levels to $35,800 at Triple-A, and they unionized, which they did successfully. Now compare: a Power 4 football program can clear $100 million in revenue in a year, built almost entirely on unpaid labor. The MiLB comparison destroys every defense of the current model. We already decided that young athletes developing toward a pro career deserve wages, benefits, and a union. College athletes generate far more money and face far more physical risk than a Single-A infielder. The only difference is that the NCAA spent 70 years insisting its workers were students first. The market spoke. Listen to it.

I spent sophomore year working 12 hours a week in the dining hall. I got a W-2, workers comp coverage, mandatory breaks, and a cap on my hours during finals week. My roommate was a backup linebacker putting in 40-plus hours a week between practice, film, workouts, and travel. He got none of that. Same university, same campus, and the kid generating millions have fewer labor protections than the kid serving chicken tenders. I think about that every time someone says employment would 'change the nature' of college sports. The nature already changed. Employment would just give the players the same deal the university already gives its fry cooks.

I taught two sections of freshman composition as a PhD student, about 15 hours a week with grading. We unionized in 2017 and the university recognized us as employees with bargaining rights over pay and workload. Meanwhile the starting quarterback was putting in 40-plus hours under a coach who controlled his schedule, his diet, his social media, and his class times, and he was legally a volunteer. The NLRB has held for decades that graduate assistants doing university work are employees. Athletes do more university work, under tighter control, generating enormously more revenue. If the TA grading your papers is an employee, the linebacker selling out your stadium is one too. There's no principled line here, just a profitable one.

In February 2024, an NLRB regional director ruled that Dartmouth's men's basketball players are employees of the university, and the team voted to unionize that March. This isn't a thought experiment anymore. A federal labor board looked at the hours, the control, the compensation in the form of equipment and tickets and early recruiting perks, and said: these are workers. The NLRB decision is under appeal and Dartmouth refuses to bargain, but the legal logic is now on the record. I coach high school kids who ask me about this. I tell them the adults spent decades saying it was impossible, and then a labor board in New England looked at an Ivy League basketball team and called it employment. The dam didn't break at Alabama. It broke at Dartmouth, which tells you how strong the case is.

My son is being recruited right now, and I keep coming back to Justice Kavanaugh's concurrence in NCAA v. Alston: 'The NCAA isn't above the law.' He wrote that the NCAA's business model would be flatly illegal in almost any other industry. Read that again as a parent. A Supreme Court justice looked at this system and said the quiet part out loud: nowhere else in America could you get away with this. The Supreme Court unanimously ruled against the NCAA in 2021, and Kavanaugh's concurrence was basically an invitation for the next lawsuit. Employment status is where that invitation leads. I'm not sending my kid into a system that a justice described as a legal anomaly without the protections every other worker takes for granted.

Stress fracture, sophomore year. Six weeks in a boot, season over. My scholarship covered tuition but I lost my summer training stipend and my spot on the travel roster, which meant losing the per diem and gear that made the whole thing affordable. An employee injured on the job files for workers' comp and keeps getting paid. I got a boot and a bill for the campus health center copays. People talk about employment like it's some radical idea, but every construction worker in America already has the deal I'm describing. I ran 60 miles a week for my university and had fewer protections than the guy who repaved the track.

I walked on to a Big 12 football roster in 2019 and earned a scholarship for my junior year. Tore my ACL in spring ball that March. The school paid for the surgery, and I'm grateful for that, but my scholarship wasn't renewed the next fall. An employee who gets hurt on the job gets workers' comp and can't be fired for the injury. I got a handshake and a bill for the rehab the team decided I no longer needed. The one-year renewable scholarship is the whole scam: it looks like compensation but behaves like an at-will job with none of the protections. If I'm working 40 hours a week for the program, I should at least get the deal every other campus worker gets.

Everyone remembers the Dartmouth ruling, but Northwestern got there first. In 2014, quarterback Kain Colter led an effort to unionize the football team, and an NLRB regional director agreed they were employees. The full board punted in 2015, declining jurisdiction over a single team in a league of mostly public schools, but it never said the players weren't employees. ESPN covered every step of it. That was a decade ago, before NIL, before the portal, before Alston. The arguments for employment have only gotten stronger since, and the board's dodge looks weaker every year. Northwestern was the warning shot. Dartmouth was the hit. The third case will be the one that sticks, and schools should be preparing for it instead of pretending 2015 settled anything.

Look at who generates the revenue and who collects it. In the Power conferences, Black athletes make up the majority of football and men's basketball rosters, the two sports that fund entire athletic departments. The head coaches, athletic directors, and conference commissioners collecting seven-figure salaries are overwhelmingly white. That's not a pattern anyone should be comfortable with. The usual defense is the scholarship, as if a degree of questionable market value settles a multimillion-dollar debt. Meanwhile the graduation data tells its own story: revenue-sport athletes, particularly Black men, graduate at lower rates than their classmates, because a 50-hour athletic week doesn't leave much room for organic chemistry. Employee status wouldn't fix all of that, but it would at least stop pretending the exchange is fair. Pay the labor force that the whole enterprise runs on. NCAA graduation and academic data

Apply the common-law control test, the standard courts use everywhere else. Does the university dictate when athletes work, where, how, and under whose supervision? Yes, down to the hour. Can athletes hire substitutes or send someone else to practice? Obviously not. Does the work benefit the university financially? To the tune of billions. Under the Department of Labor's own framework, college athletes in revenue sports are employees, full stop. The NCAA's actual defense is that applying the test would be inconvenient. Inconvenience isn't a legal doctrine. Every court that has actually looked at this, from Alston to Dartmouth, has moved in one direction.

I'm a junior from Kenya running distance on a partial scholarship. My American teammates all have NIL deals, car dealership ads, local restaurant posts. I legally can't take a single dollar of it. My F-1 visa restricts off-campus work, and NIL income would violate my status, so I watch my teammates get paid for the exact same races I run. A salary as a university employee would change everything, because on-campus employment is permitted under my visa. This is the angle nobody talks about: the current system doesn't just underpay athletes, it locks international athletes out of the only pay structure that exists. Employment status wouldn't be a bonus for us. It would be the first fair paycheck we've ever been allowed to receive.

I've taught at a Power 4 university for twelve years. Here's what I see from the faculty side: the head football coach's contract has a buyout clause he will absolutely use the day a better offer arrives, and nobody calls it disloyal. For decades, a player who wanted the same freedom lost a year of eligibility. The portal loosened the chains, but the double standard built the whole system: maximum mobility for the millionaires, maximum control for the teenagers. Employment status wouldn't create professionalism. It would just extend to players the labor rights their coaches have always enjoyed. I grade papers for a living, so I know a rigged rubric when I see one.

People forget the Olympics already ran this experiment. For most of the 20th century Olympians were amateurs, then the rules loosened and athletes took sponsorship money while keeping the spirit of the Games. The Olympics didn't collapse. Nobody thinks less of the 100-meter final because the runners have shoe deals. The Olympic model proves you can pay athletes without destroying what makes the competition special. College sports are just late to a lesson track and swimming figured out decades ago: the amateur ideal was always about who gets the money, never about purity. Let the schools pay salaries and keep the pageantry. It worked for the Olympics. It will work for Saturdays.

The NBA G League pays players real salaries, and Overtime Elite was signing teenagers to six-figure deals to skip college entirely. So universities now compete for talent against actual employers while insisting their own players are amateurs. That contradiction can't hold much longer. When the alternative to a scholarship is a pro paycheck at 18, the 'student-athlete' label stopped describing anything a while ago. It's a pay cut with homework attached attached. The market already set the price of elite teenage basketball labor, and it isn't tuition. If colleges want to keep winning recruiting battles against pro leagues like the NBA G League, they have to offer pro terms. Employment is just the market clearing.

The term "student-athlete" was coined in the 1950s by the NCAA's first executive director specifically to beat a workers' compensation claim from the widow of a football player who died from a game injury. That's the origin story of amateurism: a legal dodge, not a philosophy. Everything since has been decoration on that foundation. The Atlantic documented this history years ago in its investigation of the NCAA. Once you know that, the whole moral panic about professionalism sounds different. The Olympics dropped amateurism decades ago and nobody claims the Games lost their soul. College sports survived every previous so-called existential threat, from freshman eligibility to NIL, and each time the sport got more popular and the money got bigger. The amateurism ideal people are defending was never about purity. It was about payroll. The Atlantic

Honestly as a fan I'm tired of pretending. I watch 100,000 people pack a stadium, I see the TV contracts, I buy the jersey with the kid's number on it, and then I'm supposed to nod along that he is just grateful for his meal plan? It's theater and everyone knows it. Pay them, call them employees, let them unionize, whatever. At least then the product on the field stops being built on a polite fiction. And maybe it stabilizes the transfer portal chaos too, because right now we have free agency with none of the contracts that make free agency work. Give me real professionalism over fake amateurism. The games will still be great on Saturdays.

I've been in the equipment room eight years. I see these kids at 5 am when nobody's watching. The anxiety, the depression, some of them barely holding it together. Employees get health benefits and mental health coverage through their job. Athletes get whatever the training room offers while they're eligible, and good luck after. I'm not an economist, I just lace cleats, but it seems backwards that the people generating the money get thinner support than the staff folding their towels.

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

I run athletics at a Division II school with a $14 million budget. Football loses money. Basketball loses money. We sponsor 18 sports because our mission is participation, not profit. Make athletes employees and my payroll obligation explodes overnight: wages, benefits, payroll taxes, workers' comp, multiplied across 400 athletes and then roughly doubled again by Title IX. Where does that money come from? We don't have a TV deal. We have ticket sales and student fees. Employment doesn't just change big-time football. It ends college sports at hundreds of schools like mine, and with them the only chance thousands of kids get to compete, stay in school, and earn a degree. The debate always centers on the 30 programs that print money. The casualties will be the 1,000 that don't.

Forty years of season tickets, third generation in our seats. Here's what the employment crowd misses: minor-league baseball pays its players and draws 4,000 fans on a good night. We draw 100,000. The product is the school. People pay because those are OUR kids, wearing OUR colors, going to OUR classes. Turn them into university employees and you've built Triple-A football with homework, and Triple-A football doesn't sell out stadiums or move TV needles. The amateur tie, real or romanticized, is the entire business model. Kill it and you don't get fairer football. You get emptier stadiums.

I'm a CPA and nobody is talking about the tax bomb. Right now athletic scholarships are generally tax-free under Section 117. Reclassify athletes as employees and that tuition, housing, and meal money arguably becomes taxable compensation. A $70,000 scholarship package could generate a five-figure tax bill for a 19-year-old with no cash wages to pay it with. Plus the school owes payroll taxes on all of it. The IRS doesn't care about your amateurism ideals. It cares whether money changed hands for services rendered. Employment status could leave athletes financially worse off than the current system, owing taxes on benefits they used to get free. Be careful what you wish for.

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.

I play volleyball at a mid-major, full scholarship, and I'm grateful every day. But let's be honest about what employment does to women's sports. When payroll becomes mandatory, athletic directors don't cut football. They cut the sports that don't generate revenue, and that's us: volleyball, softball, soccer, track. Title IX means you can't just pay the football team, so the math gets even uglier, and the easiest compliance move is sponsoring fewer women's sports, not paying more of them. The Knight Commission has been warning about this spending arms race for years. Employment status sounds like justice until your program is the line item that gets deleted to fund it.

Universities exist to educate. The moment athletes become employees, the school becomes their employer first and their educator second, and don't tell me the balance will hold. An employer can cut you for underperformance. An employer doesn't care about your midterm. The entire premise of college athletics, shaky as it's, is that the classroom comes first. People say that premise is already fiction at Alabama and Ohio State. Fine, maybe it's there. But it's not fiction at the other 95 percent of schools, where athletes really are students who play sports, graduate, and become engineers and teachers. Employment status is a one-size-fits-all sledgehammer designed for the 30 programs that print money, and it will land hardest on the thousands of programs where the current model actually works. Reform the top if you must. Don't burn down the whole structure to fix the penthouse.

The money problem is basically solved. NIL lets stars earn real money, the portal lets them shop for the best situation, and revenue sharing is now part of the landscape. Athletes have more economic power than at any point in history, all without anyone becoming an employee. Employment is a sledgehammer for a problem that's already being fixed with smaller tools. Let the current reforms play out before blowing up a system that, for all its flaws, educates hundreds of thousands of athletes a year.

Has anyone thought through what employment actually looks like across 50 states? A unionized team at a private school in New Hampshire bargaining under federal labor law, while the public school across town answers to a state labor board with completely different rules. Strikes before rivalry week. Players as W-2 employees filing taxes in six states from away games. Walk-ons: are they employees too, or second-class citizens in their own locker room? What about DIII, where nobody gets a dime? The people pushing this talk like it's a light switch. It's fifty different labor regimes, Title IX litigation, tax consequences for teenagers, and collective bargaining with 18-year-olds who change schools every spring. I'm not saying the current system is just. I'm saying the replacement has to be designed, not declared, and "make them employees" is a slogan, not a plan.

I played four years of D1 soccer on a full ride. Let me total what I actually received: tuition, housing, meals, books, elite coaching, strength training, physical therapy, tutoring, travel, gear. That's well over $100,000 a year in value, tax-free, with zero debt. I graduated with a degree and working knees. The employment debate acts like athletes get nothing. We get one of the best compensation packages available to any 18-year-old in America. The NCAA system has real flaws, but pretending scholarship athletes are exploited laborers insults everyone who would kill for that deal. Pay the revenue stars if you want. Don't pretend the package is nothing.

I swim D3. No scholarships, no NIL deals, 5 am practice because I love it. Nobody is making money off me and I'm not making money off anyone. If athletes become employees, what am I? An employee of the school for swimming slow? The whole employment conversation is about football and men's basketball, and the rest of us are just supposed to accept whatever system they design. My team would probably get cut the day payroll starts. I didn't come here to be labor or management. I came to race.

Competitive balance is already strained, and employment ends it. Right now recruiting has at least some friction: geography, academics, tradition. Add open salaries and the richest 15 programs simply buy every roster, every year, with payrolls no one else can approach. The NFL has a salary cap and revenue sharing to prevent exactly this. College would have neither, just a bidding war. ESPN would love it: Alabama versus Ohio State every January, forever. Everyone else becomes a farm team. If you think the sport is top-heavy now, wait until payroll replaces recruiting.

I led a university for nine years, and I can picture the first strike. Unionized players, certified bargaining unit, and a walkout threat the week of the Final Four or the playoff. That's what unions do. It's their leverage, and it's their right. But a labor stoppage in the middle of March Madness would be catastrophic for everyone: the players who lose their showcase, the schools, the fans, the networks. Add union dues skimmed off 19-year-olds' paychecks and a grievance process for playing time disputes, and you've imported every dysfunction of industrial labor relations into something that used to be, whatever its flaws, about education. Some genies don't go back in bottles.

Most of my student-athletes will go pro in something other than sports. That's a cliché because it's true. Employment redefines their relationship with the university from educational to transactional, and something real is lost there. The campus bond, the alumni connection, the sense of representing your school: these things have value even if you can't put them on a balance sheet. I'm not sure the kids demanding salaries have thought about what they give up.