why it’s time for college athletes to be paid a little bit

A nice outrageous story college basketball story can be read HERE. (Hat tip, J. Protevi.) The kid took $200 from a former coach to help feed his family, and was ruled ineligible by the NCAA. $200! As an unpaid worker in a multi-billion dollar industry!

We pay graduate students fairly livable stipends, and I don’t see why we can’t do the same for athletes (generally poorer than graduate students) when these athletes are generating corporate levels of profit for their universities. (Though frankly, I’m in favor of clearing all these sports out of the universities to begin with, and putting them in European-style sports clubs. Cash cow sports programs, much though I’v enjoyed watching them over the years, simply bring appalling levels of corruption into higher education.)