Student Athletes Now to Receive Compensation

The NCAA this week has approved a vast number of reforms brought before it. In one of the biggest issues in years, the NCAA has deemed it possible for conferences to indirectly pay student athletes for their contributions in the sport.

For years, proponents of paying student athletes argued that it was unfair for schools to pocket all the revenue earned from sponsorship, advertising, boosters, athletic grants and ticket sales. Athletic scholarships varied in size, but the largest would only pay for a student's tuition and board. Medical costs were diagnosed and paid by sports faculties.

The argument against paying student athletes is that it belittles the nature of friendly competition, sets the wrong ideals for impressionable youths in college, and is possibly unfair to others who cannot afford to attend colleges even with some scholarships without taking on great financial risk.

Now, however, one of the reforms the NCAA passed earlier this week has granted the ability for athletic scholarships to be awarded to athletes up to $2,000 in excess of the cost of tuition and board. Put simply, this now means that student athletes could earn up to $2,000 extra per semester for playing in a national sport for a school.

Under, Title IX rules, schools must equally distribute additional funding of the scholarships between men's sports and women's sports. While some of the larger schools will be able to defer money between its teams with relative ease, smaller schools and non-BCS schools will have a harder time being able to afford to pay the option of extra scholarship money. This in itself causes another problem.

Student athletes previously had to consider which universities to attend based on program preferences, academic standing and other lifestyle choices. Now, however, the question of which schools will be able to dole out more money can have a very possible likelihood of factoring into where some premiere high school students choose to go to college.

Florida Times-Union reporter Michael DiRocco believes this aspect of the reform can have another adverse effect.

"Especially with recent conference realignments, the new reform can lead to increased conference realignment because some schools will want to move to conferences with larger athletic expenditures," DiRocco said.

Amidst the grumblings of college students who fear of losing traditional football rivalries due to conference changes, this could potentially be a new problem, he said.

"It's much too early to tell," DiRocco said. "To actually see the effects the reform will have on athletes and even schools changing, we might well have to wait a year or two."

The NCAA passed these reforms to deflect light from some of the controversy it's faced in recent years, but the potential drawbacks of the new reform could open a new can of worms.