As more and more prominent college athletes come through the final years of their education, the debate of whether or not they should be paid for the hard work they put in at the collegiate level has come up.

No matter the sport an athlete is playing at the collegiate level, they should not be paid. The disadvantages outweigh the few amount of good things that would come from giving college athletes a paycheck each month.

Paying college athletes would give some people looking in from the outside the idea that colleges are focusing more on athletics rather than academics. At the end of the day, people are at college for not only sports, but for an education. Pay for college athletes would cause for them to focus more on their athletics than doing their homework and getting stuff done in the classroom. If this were the case, some college athletes would have a low drive and bad work ethic to get things done in the work world if their professional career doesn’t work out.

Along with possibly focusing less on academics and more on sports, paying college athletes would eliminate the barrier between college sports and professional sports. Not all college athletes are cut out to play the sport they love professionally. Paying athletes in college would take away the levels of amateurism and professionalism. A player may not be good enough to play their sport at the professional level, so paying them when they are at an “amateur” level just does not make sense.

Scholarships are the reason that a lot of athletes get to continue playing sports in college. Athletes on scholarships already get so much off their tuition, so why should they get more by being paid? This would also cause colleges to lose more and more money that could be going towards literally anything else that college has to offer. Colleges should continue to play it smart and balance the money that they put into everything that makes a college what it is.