Reflecting on the "Shame of College Sports: Should NCAA Div 1 Basketball and Football players get paid?"

Arguments in favor of paying college athletes:
- College sports, especially football and basketball, are already big-time televised events that generate huge amounts of revenue for schools. Furthermore, the biggest football programs already attract the best talent with coaching talent and various amenities, and paying players would change exactly none of that.
-Forcing players to play without getting paid is a form of labor exploitation, pure and simple. Football and basketball players spend much of the year training and practicing, while also being expected to do schoolwork and, in many cases, hold down a job in order to support their own discretionary spending. Forcing athletes into the "broke student" lifestyle makes them into perfect targets for unscrupulous boosters, who in the past have agreed to sponsor an athlete's lifestyle (buying them cars, shoes, etc.) in exchange for a return on the investment once the player goes pro. Allowing the colleges to pay players would, presumably, eliminate this financial mischief.

Arguments against:
- The NCAA asserts that its members cannot afford to pay their athletes, despite paying millions for their coaching staffs. Furthermore, allowing athletes to be paid as though they were professional would corrupt the "amateur spirit of college athletics."

My opinion:
- My solution to this problem is covered in my last blog entry: adopting the European system of sporting development. Instead of a clunky, corruptible and archaic system that attempts to marry sporting development and higher education (which mix about as well as oil and water), we accept the fact that professional sport is its own trade, and that pro teams should develop their own players without exploiting higher education as their own personal minor leagues. Why should a college president be tasked with running a minor-league pro sports team? Higher education can be a great place to nurture the less popular sports, like rowing, gymnastics, swimming, et al, that wouldn't exist without the support of the college system and that have no lucrative professional leagues, but for the big-time glamorous sports, it just doesn't make sense.

The bottom line is that in this country, playing football or basketball can be a  very high-paying job, and the education that prepares one for a career as a professional jock does not need to take place in the same institution where people learn how to be lawyers, businesspeople, doctors, and so on. There is a reason that people have established different trade schools for the culinary arts, learning how to fly planes, engineering, and so forth: because all these arts require very specific fields of expertise and very specialized equipment. So it is with professional athletics. Pro athletes have specialized diet regimens, exercise routines, and access to state of the art equipment and facilities. As it is now, only certain colleges can afford to make similar boasts. This spending distracts colleges from what they should be concerned with: research and education.

Sources:
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-01-02/how-much-should-college-athletes-get-paid#p2
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/10/the-shame-of-college-sports/308643/2/
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/06/magazine/06Soccer-t.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0