Column: Top college athletes deserve compensation

One bizarre feature of American life is that perhaps our most highly publicized labor disputes are between rich athletes and super-rich sports team owners. Rarely do the plights of the athletes or owners inspire much sympathy. The average fan roots for a restoration of play, not for upper-income professional athletes to win a decisive victory for labor against management.

And yet, in the world of sports, there are anticompetitive labor practices that warrant our attention. Particularly in college football and basketball, sports that generate revenue for many collegiate institutions, we accept that colleges may form a cartel to severely restrict athlete salaries. Many student-athletes’ marginal revenue products far exceed the value of their scholarships. These athletes are denied the opportunity to negotiate for greater compensation. Both free-market purists and advocates of labor should be appalled by this result.

Media coverage of the economics of college sports often focus on recruiting violations without examining the market forces that contribute to these violations. When a coach breaks NCAA rules by offering special perks to prospective recruits, major news outlets, not just ESPN, react as if a major crime has been committed. Rarely do journalists or commentators identify NCAA rules as a contributing factor to a climate of athletic corruption.

It seems rather obvious that if you are a talented athlete whose work will generate far more revenue than you can bargain for, you might feel justified in accepting greater benefits than you are supposedly entitled to by NCAA rules. And although athletics programs collectively want to constrain student-athlete compensation, the best players are worth far more to top-tier football and basketball programs than the cost of a scholarship. Constraining athletes’ compensation, even if they are students, is bound to lead to a black market. Players and athletic programs may be breaking the rules with recruiting violations, but we should not forget that the rules are bad: They have the effect of restricting young people from negotiating for the value of their labor.

One of the most frequently cited arguments against paying college players is that compensating college players for their services would taint college sports. The argument suggests players should play for the love of the game; money gives the sport a distasteful “commercial” air. This argument ignores the fact that college sports have already been commercialized. Conferences and schools have major television deals and corporate sponsorships. College athletic gear is ubiquitous. Right now, however, the fruits of this commercialization flow to college coaches, athletic program directors and academic institutions. Paying college athletes would not make college sports more commercial, it would just make players benefit more from commercialization of college sports than has already occurred.

Another argument raised against paying college athletes is that the NCAA cartel is legal. According to current law, this is true — the courts have historically protected academic institutions from antitrust violations regarding student-player compensation. I do not have the legal expertise to say whether the NCAA cartel should be subject to antitrust law regarding player compensation. But, regardless of the current legal status of the NCAA cartel, restricting athletes’ ability to negotiate their wages seems contrary to the academic missions of most universities. Supposedly high-minded academic institutions should not be working together to make money off of their students’ abilities and labor.

The NCAA’s cartel is a vastly underreported story of labor restriction. The NBA and NFL’s lockouts have engendered much discussion and debate, but these disputes affect far fewer athletes than does the NCAA cartel. At present, there is very little public pressure to force the NCAA to change its compensation practices; indeed, few people even think a problem exists. But if one believes in free markets or wants the fruits of labor to flow not to management but to laborers, the NCAA system is unacceptable. College-athlete compensation should be an issue on which the economic left and right can agree: Players should be able to negotiate for greater compensation.