Date of Submission
Fall 2019
Academic Programs and Concentrations
Economics; Africana Studies
Project Advisor 1
Michael Martell
Project Advisor 2
Pavlina Tcherneva
Abstract/Artist's Statement
The National Collegiate Athletics Association (NCAA), which is the governing board for intercollegiate athletics in the United States, earns large amounts of revenue from major college sports like Division I football and men’s basketball but does not provide any compensation beyond basic athletic scholarships to the student-athletes who generate the revenue. In recent years, the NCAA has come under increased scrutiny due to what is perceived as hypocrisy—that is, the NCAA using its student-athletes to generate hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue but refusing to provide fair compensation to the student-athletes. Because a majority of student-athletes on Division I football and men’s basketball teams are black, many scholars have accused the NCAA of implementing racist policies that exploit black student-athletes. This paper provides a critical analysis of the NCAA as a microcosm of American society, including the disparate impact of the NCAA’s amateurism policy and the commercialization of intercollegiate athletics on black student-athletes. Specifically, the paper examines the history of racism and segregation in America and in intercollegiate athletics, the integration of black student-athletes onto college sports teams, discrimination against black student-athletes within sports, the rise of capitalism in intercollegiate sports, the diminishing concept of amateurism, and the role of race in the NCAA’s refusal to pay a fair wage to student-athletes. The paper discusses various theoretical perspectives regarding the exploitation of black student-athletes and offers a proposal for the reform of intercollegiate athletics. The paper concludes that it is hypocritical for the NCAA to use student-athletes to generate billions of dollars in revenue, distribute large proportions of the revenue to everyone but the student-athletes who generate it, and claim “amateurism” as the reason for its refusal to pay fair compensation to student-athletes.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.
Recommended Citation
Miller, Wynn S., "Fair Pay to Play: The Compensation Debate and The Exploitation of Black Student-Athletes" (2019). Senior Projects Fall 2019. 43.
https://digitalcommons.bard.edu/senproj_f2019/43
This work is protected by a Creative Commons license. Any use not permitted under that license is prohibited.
