Should NCAA "Student Athletes" get paid?

[Foxaèr]

Sports get the most money because it's mindless entertainment.

If I had my way, sports would get hardly any money and other departments would get the money they deserve.

Sadly, people would rather rot their minds by watching sports than blossom their minds through any effort of academics.

[Anomalocaris]

That purpose is what I'm trying to ferret out.

The purpose is that they make money for the college, and therefore the general academic fund.

No, I think their purpose is to make money for the sports program and investors in private universities, they justify themselves to the public by sharing some of the loot with academia. Since in the context, academics is a cost center, and sports a profit center, it is not hard to see how much a university running with an eye towards profit is likely to invest the proceeds in academics beyond what is absolutely essential for keeping up the most minimum pretense of the minimum appearance.

[SteelCurtain]

Fair point. But the football program brings in money, whereas the physics department for the most part, doesn't. Whether it's the right way or not, football/basketball serves its purpose.

The answer to your question is that it's both. The biggest universities are the outliers, but the norm is that academics are the primary focus.

While at the beginning, it may appear sports is facilitating academics. But in reality, it only serves to hide from the public how much the public has failed to underwrite academics needed for its own good, and preferred to lavish on bread and circus instead. It can't be long before bread and circus would be most of all that is left of university.

I agree. But in a capitalist society, the bread trail always leads to the money and the feel good.

Academics, sadly, has neither.

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Sports get the most money because it's mindless entertainment.

If I had my way, sports would get hardly any money and other departments would get the money they deserve.

Sadly, people would rather rot their minds by watching sports than blossom their minds through any effort of academics.

The two aren't mutually exclusive, and if the sports don't get any money, neither do the academics. It's those 100,000 seat stadiums filling up week by week that buys the new physics lab.

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No, I think their purpose is to make money for the sports program and investors in private universities, they justify themselves to the public by sharing some of the loot with academia. Since in the context, academics is a cost center, and sports a profit center, it is not hard to see how much a university running with an eye towards profit is likely to invest the proceeds in academics beyond what is absolutely essential for keeping up the most minimum pretense of the minimum appearance.

It seems like this would be the case, but in all honesty if you go into the classrooms you'd see that for the most part, the people teaching those classes are pretty passionate about their specific brand of academia, regardless of how much profit the University takes in. When you look at what the most monetarily prosperous universities produce academically, you'll see that places like U of M, OSU, USC, and Florida produce some of the best academics in the nation. And you'll also notice where the best hospitals are, where the most cited research papers come from.

So the system is broken, and it could/should certainly be more geared towards academia. More of that money that the sports bring should absolutely be given to the academics. But that's not how capitalism works, and whether we know what the right thing is or not, money will always influence people to try and make more money by the easiest route possible.

[Minimalist]

That purpose is what I'm trying to ferret out.

The purpose is that they make money for the college, and therefore the general academic fund.

Yeah, that's the story that the NCAA puts out. I find it hard to believe much of what those fuckers say.