College Athlete Compensation Imagine working 40+ hours a week and starting very early in the morning and sometimes working late into the night to be the best. Sometimes you work even harder. Imagine having a job and not getting paid, but rather just doing it because you loved it. This is what the life of a college athlete is like; they play because they like it but they don't earn a single cent. Would you still do your job if you didn't get paid? College athletes should be paid to compensate for their hard work. To better understand why college athletes should be paid, we need to understand why the NCAA doesn't already pay them, what their salary would be, and how much time they dedicate to their sports. So, we need to know if the sport you play will affect how much you get paid, will it affect the pay of coaches and other staff, and how many division one athletes are there? College athletes currently don't get paid due to the agreement they sign with the NCAA that states they can't receive pay for play. The NCAA still considers these athletes to be amateurs even though they are some of the best athletes in the world. Additionally, they give out scholarships worth up to $125,000 that allow these athletes to go to school for free. The next question we need to find out is how much college athletes would be paid and what their salary would be. This year Andrew Wiggins was worth $1.6 million while Johnny Manziel was worth $547,000. The projected market value for the average college basketball player is $375,000 and the average college football player is worth $178,000. Colleges wouldn't be able to pay players millions of dollars, but they would be able to if it was hundreds of thousands. Highest-earning college football... middle of paper... least (Northern Illinois' Rod Carey makes $376,000 a year). I think one thing that might affect pay is the school you attend, in Alabama you will most likely make more than someone at a smaller school due to the difference in income. We can only know for sure if the NCAA allows payment for play and sets guidelines, otherwise we have no idea. There are currently over 100,000 division one student athletes. Basketball is the number one sport in terms of numbers with 350 teams across the country. Baseball is second with 298 teams. There are many other sports, these are just a couple of the big ones. This also shows how many athletes there are. Most of these athletes will never go pro, so they should be paid to play their sport while they can. In football only 4% of players will become professionals, which is not a high number at all.