Are they though? Graduating with a bachelor's degree, having the potential at a big professional sports career, and all the local opportunities they get by being a basketball/football/etc. player at THEEE is "underpaid"? And that statement leaves out the fact that they graduate, if they're smart, with ZERO student loan debt, which is a BIG deal for those who are facing $100,000 of debt as "regular" students that recently graduated.

These student athletes are effectively paid tuition, room, and board to the tune of around twenty-five grand a year.

The only argument I'm on board with that I don't like with the student athlete arrangement is their inability to own the rights to their image. Otherwise, while I admire the amount of work they put in, because it's a ton, they aren't given zero compensation.

Look at my earlier post about top salaries at OSU. The president makes 1M and a few medical school folks are close to 2M. Meyer is at 4.6, Matta 3.6, Smith and the women's coach are over 1M. Harbaugh at Michigan makes 8M. You get the point. At those ever increasing salaries the players are underpaid dramatically. If the salaries were more in line with top administrators at the university, the scholarship is adequate.

It's the same point in every state, where a sports coach is the highest paid public employee in 49 of the 50 states, and often times they make up almost all of the top 10 spots. So you continually speak like this only exist in Ohio.

I can see that point of view. No college coach should, in theory, be paid that much. On the other hand, the amount of money that success makes some universities helps justify those salaries.

Yep, sorry, fat fingers hit the 4 instead of the three. This link has a cool map ;-)

http://deadspin.com/infographic-is-your-states-highest-pa...

As an overall athletic department, many schools lose money, but their football and/or basketball programs make lots of money... enough to subsidize the non-revenue sports.

We've also discussed how the Flutie Effect results in, at best, a limited time bump in the quantity of applications but no real effect on the quality of the applicant pool and freshman classes. So, in my mind, the question becomes--if you're using applications to justify athletic subsidies--what is a more productive use of that 18 million dollars every year? Pump it into the athletic department for the residual "advertising effect" or use it directly for student recruitment and merit scholarships.