I agree with you on this, but you have to admit in many situations they are getting four years of food, a poor to fair education, some wonderful travel, and if they are an athlete in a good program the chance to improve. Guess what? There are other options.
#1 Don’t accept the scholarship, you know the situation, if you are being exploited, take your talents to a D-league or any other paying program that will take you.
#2 Don’t let the NCAA system exploit you and give you a crappy education, pay for any that you are qualified to obtain, apply for academic scholarships, make it on your own like the other 92% of college students.
#3 Screw College!!! Get a job at the mill, McDonalds, a yard service, bust right our into the real world and start earning your 24k.
To act like these student athletes receive nothing in return is a joke. There are other options, so if you do not like the system, don’t play. I promise there is a long list of High School athletes that will take the spot. Some will choose the easy crappy degrees being handed to them, others will push for bigger and better things and earn very impressive degrees that will take them far in life.
It all starts with the greed at the professional level, and it filters all the way down to the kids in Junior High School. Kids being told they are great at certain sports and that the world should reward them in the future. Most adults work at jobs where the company reaps more rewards than the paycheck the employee pulls home, it’s just simple business. If Athlete’s feel they are being shorted they can choose any of the options I mentioned above.
I do not think it's is fair that there are not more stories about athletes or statistics showing the number of NCAA participants who would have never gone to college that now hold degrees and have obtained jobs that would have never been possible. I promise the good would out weigh the bad, but the media (ESPN, HBO, 60 Minute and the like) like to find the fewer tarnished stories and make them out shine the positive ones.
So why are we not paying student-athletes?
Oh yeah, because they're getting an "education" worth tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars.