Scholarships Are Not Enough

College athletes work extremely hard, often with great injury, to bring millions to a university. Scholarships are just not enough compensation for these heros

Poll: More people than ever believe college athletes should be paid

It's worth noting that not all respondents necessarily mean that the athletes should be paid a salary. Many of them, Gentile says, “are thinking compensation beyond scholarship,” which could manifest in a number of ways. (Some supporters of paying college athletes have proposed stipends for travel, or for parents to travel, or food tickets, or other gifts.)

The issue of compensation for college athletes has come to a head in the past few years for a number of factors: rising revenue of the NCAA; large bonus payments for coaches and athletic directors of football programs that qualify for a bowl game; and the legal case of former UCLA basketball star Ed O’Bannon against the NCAA and against EA Games for using players’ likenesses, among other contributing events.

March Madness basketball, of course, is another annual event that gets people humming again about paying college athletes. This year’s tournament is already setting gambling records.

Nigel Hayes, a star at The University of Wisconsin, reignited the issue this season when he appeared on ESPN College GameDay holding up a homemade sign: “Broke college athlete, anything helps” with his Venmo username. More than 2,000 fans sent him money.

For the purposes of the poll, Seton Hall surveyed 739 adults across the US, by phone, from March 20 to 22. The poll has a margin of error of 3.7 percentage points