Scholarships for Athletes

This week, longtime consumer advocate Ralph Nader is calling for the elimination of college athletic scholarships, saying the move is necessary to "de-professionalize" college athletes. Nader says that this proposed move would be replaced with need-based financial aid for students and would restore academic integrity to collegiate sports.

While this appears to be a legitimate concept on paper, in reality, this idea would never actually work when it is implemented. First off, the plan would never be implemented because the colleges that would be affected would never agree to it. The biggest source of revenue for universities like Ohio State and Florida is in the athletic department, specifically football and men's basketball. The college culture that surrounds these "big money" sports has already been developed and is used by all of the power conferences. The way to get the most money from these sports is to assemble the best team possible, and the way to do this is to recruit the most talented kids to your program. A recruiting staple that all Division I colleges use is a full athletic scholarship to attract these student-athletes. Especially in the power sports, five-star recruits demand athletic scholarships and, for the most part, colleges will give one to them. With this already a vital part of collegiate sports, in is unfeasible to simply erase it from college culture.

I do agree, however, that academics in collegiate sports need to be much more important. After all, they don't call them student-athletes for nothing.