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Naviance has Duke University listed at about $60,000 per year. The University of Michigan, UCLA, and Notre Dame are all around $55,000 per year to attend.
College athletes, who are at the top of their sport, are getting all of this for free to play their sport. Each of the athletes on the Michigan basketball team are effectively getting “paid” $55,000 a year to go there and to get better at basketball. There are very few fields in the real world where an 18-year old can get a job paying $55,000 a year with nothing more than a high school diploma. These kids, because that’s what they are, leave school when they are 22 years old with absolutely no debt, which very few 22-year-olds with a degree from a prominent university can say. Business Insider states, that only about two percent of these college athletes actually go on to play in their respective professional sport, and that other 98 percent is set up far better than the rest of their peers because once they get a job in the workforce, they get to keep all of that money rather than having to pay off debts with the first few rounds of paychecks.
For that two percent that is going pro, they are also better off. Being a professional basketball player does not last for many, and they end up needing to get a real-person job sooner or later. Those who went the four years at college and then could not cut it in their sport are set up with a degree and do not have to spend more time and money for classes that they could have done before.
Lastly, the athletes shouldn’t be paid in college, because that would just start them earlier on having more money than they know what to do with. The National Bureau of Economic Research recently came out with a study that stated between the years 1996 and 2003, 1.9% of draftees declared bankruptcy within two years of retirement. That number skyrockets to 15.7% after 15 years. A big reason for that is the kids earning all this money are not given advice on how to handle it, and they end up spending it frivolously on cars or partying with fair weather friends. Paying the kids in college would just start that whole cycle a couple years earlier.
Getting a college diploma, and not having to pay anything for it, is enough compensation, because it will end up changing the lives of these kids more than a flat check for coming to play basketball at their college.
