College Athletes Are Being Robbed of an Education

The college football season kicked off on August 24, when Florida State and Georgia Tech visited Dublin, Ireland, to battle it out in the Aer Lingus College Football Classic. While those athletes fulfilled their athletic obligations overseas, other students at Georgia Tech had already begun classes. This discrepancy between academic and athletic experiences on U.S. campuses is no surprise. College football players consistently experience the pedagogical side of higher education in drastically different ways than other students — not because of differences in individual aptitude, but because they face profound structural barriers to achieving a robust educational experience.

That’s unacceptable, because education is quite literally the form of compensation offered to college football players in exchange for their revenue-producing athletic labor. Recent changes to name, image, and likeness rules do mean that athletes can now be paid by third parties for additional promotional work, but this is not the same as a direct payment for their labor from their employer, the university. That payment comes exclusively in the form of the scholarship (a fact that may modestly change in the future because of the recent House settlement, which would require universities to pay $2.8 billion in damages to former players, remove the cap on scholarships, and compel Power Four campuses to allocate 22 percent of their average revenue to compensate athletes).

This inherently exploitative employment model is made worse by the reality that the compensatory education on offer to athletes is vastly inferior to the version offered to other college students. That’s because of the simple fact that, despite the misleading moniker “student-athlete,” the truth is that in the world of college football, athletic performance is always prioritized over scholarly pursuits, whether because of the scheduling of games and practices interfering with class time, athletic departments funneling players to “easier” majors, summer obligations that preclude internships and time abroad, or the sheer fatigue involved in this form of labor. As one former player told us: “Education is not the most important thing in college football. That’s just the reality. It is only a means to an end. To keep you on campus so that you can play.”

If a deficient education is their ultimate payment, players are in fact being subjected to a systematic form of wage theft. They are denied the pedagogical reward that was promised.

We have spoken to over 25 former big-time college football players, almost all of them at Power Four institutions. The testimony that those players shared reveals that no matter how much an athlete might value their education, they are compelled to sideline it for the work that will line the athletic department’s coffers. Given the instructional mandate of higher education, this banal and ubiquitous form of exploitation is in fact an enormous scandal. It threatens the very principles upon which universities are accredited.

Perhaps the most basic indictment of the “student-athlete” model of college football is the simple fact that the demands of the sport necessarily compromise the capacity to receive a full educational experience. As one former player told us:

Our first four games were all night games. So they decided the best thing to do was to have night practice. So we would get out there around 6:15 and we wouldn’t leave that facility till around 11:00. And so we would get our late, late dinner and while we were at dinner, I would see these athletes after going out and banging heads for an hour try to finish homework, try to turn something in before midnight, and I was like, “I have no idea how any of these players are going to graduate.” And the sad fact of the matter is a lot of them won’t. ... They will not meet the GPA, they will not get the classes. Their eligibility will expire before they get the degree.

Over and over, we heard from players that coaches prioritized football over academics. In fact, when players demonstrated a commitment to their education, they were often castigated for it. As another player said:

I would literally leave practice at 5:45, 20 minutes early. I wouldn’t even shower because I’d just change my clothes. … I mean [I had] literally seconds to spare every single day [to make it to a professor’s class who punished tardiness with grade deductions]. And [my position coach] would cuss me out ... and everything, all this because I had to go to class.

The player summed it up: “I never felt like a student-athlete. I always felt like an athlete-student.”

The vast majority of players we spoke to felt that their educational experiences were dramatically different from those of their nonathlete peers. As one former player told us with a laugh, “You can’t do a semester abroad!” Nonathletes, this player said, “have a little more time to do extra studying, extra research ... maybe pursue something that would be harder for us to do time-wise or whatever. That could be a major, that could be an internship or something.” Yet it is precisely such opportunities that are often used by major universities to justify exorbitant tuition costs — the remission of which is ostensibly these athletes’ compensation.

Scheduling challenges are far from the only impediment to a rich and rewarding academic experience for college football players. Perhaps worse is the fact that the physical and emotional demands of football make it difficult to be fully present in academic spaces. “I was definitely always tired,” as one player said, “but it just kind of was the norm.” Likewise, another player indexed the mental load caused by the fear of being publicly excoriated by coaches. “I would always be thinking about practice at two o’clock versus the class I’m in now. It was always dreading the next day of workout — ‘Oh, are we going to get smoked?’” “Smoked,” the player explained, “is the term used for punishment.”

Another problem is the issue of academic clustering, when players are steered into non-STEM majors perceived to be less demanding in order to facilitate focus on football. One player explained: “If you came in an engineer major, you were really a general-studies guy, you just didn’t know it yet — because so many of the engineering classes happened in the fall and happened in the afternoon. That’s when we practiced. Many of these required classes were going to be conflicting with your football schedule.”

It is unsurprising, then, that one former player who left the football team and continued his academic career was startled to discover how much more he was able to get out of college without the competing demands of football. “Not only did I enjoy being at” college “more,” he said, “but I started doing very well in classes and getting more out of them. I was engaging. I was going to office hours that I didn’t usually go to before because I had practice and stuff. I was developing relationships with teachers.”

What each of these cases demonstrates is that the wage theft that is academic exploitation in college football is a structural issue that has nothing whatsoever to do with scholarly aptitude, desire, engagement, or cheating and corruption. The point is that, under the current professionalized college-sport regime, it is simply not possible to receive a college education.

The interviews quoted here are drawn from the authors’ The End of College Football: On the Human Cost of an All-American Game, forthcoming from the University of North Carolina Press.