Paying College Athletes

According to a 1994. Los Angeles Daily News article since 1956 institutions of higher learning have offered athletically gifted young men and women the opportunity to play their respective sports at the Division-1 collegiate level. For their services to the universities, these student-athletes would receive compensation in the form of an athletic scholarship. For many years that was enough for most college athletes. The opportunity to go to college free of charge and play the sport you …

…pro career is not successful. Without having graduated from college, many of them will not have the safety net that a college degree can provide. Former Georgetown University point guard Allen Iverson had this to say when he left school two years early in 1996: "Something has to be done. If my situation at home had permitted me to stay in school, if I had been well off, I think I would have stayed in school."