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The nation’s best college football and basketball players are worth hundreds of thousands of dollars to their programs and yet live below the poverty line at 85 percent of the institutions where they receive full athletic scholarships, a new report asserts. The report, which was first obtained Monday by the Associated Press, argues that colleges should award students at least some of that revenue, which amounts to $121,000 annually for the average Football Bowl Subdivision player and $265,000 for a basketball player at the same level.
The National College Players Association and a Drexel University professor calculated the players’ value by applying the same revenue-sharing models used in professional sports to colleges. Athletic conferences have begun discussing ways to bridge the gap between the full cost of attendance and what students actually receive through sports scholarships – a gap that the report found ranges by college from $952 to $6,127 – but officials are resistant to the idea of paying athletes outright.
