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College Athletes Amateurism

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Schooled: The Price of college sports, is a documentary that serves to shed light on the on going tension between college athletes and the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) with regards to amateurism. The NCAA justifies the idea of amateurism by claiming that athletes benefit by gaining a quality college education in exchange for playing college sports. However, student athletes are prohibited from receiving worker’s compensation and cannot receive money for commercial endorsements despite bringing in billions of dollars in revenue for the sports college industry. As a result, many ethical issues have arisen due to the amateurism structure adopted by the NCAA, which has led to educational injustices, financial injustices and, …show more content…
However, many of the athletes are academically challenged, and do not have the academic qualifications to study at some of these elite schools. Yet, these athletes still get recruited because the NCAA is able to pull some strings and lower the academic bar for them. Once school begins however, athletes barely have time to focus on getting the most out of their degree because so much emphasis is put into going to practice. As a result, many of the athletes enrol in “paper” classes that require little work but still allow them to receive high grades. Unfortunately, these classes offer no real learning, but the NCAA can get away with it because non-athletes take these classes too. Athletes are thus left with nothing to fall back on if they don’t become professional athletes, except for an “easy” degree with limited future job …show more content…
The NCAA constantly puts the lives of athletes at risk in order to please the greater good or in other words the fans, but does not even hold itself accountable if the athlete gets injured. In fact, when athletes get injured to the point where they can no longer play in a college sport anymore, they tend to lose their scholarship and the NCAA basically abandons them. In addition, athletes cannot seek liability for long term medical expenses even if they become paralyzed like in Kent Waldrep’s case. As a result, these athletes can no longer go on to finish their degrees, they are forced to cope with an injury for the rest of their lives and sometimes even die from the injury. This is all because the NCAA is extrinsically motivated by money and fame and refuses to compensate athletes for any sports related

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