It has always been a wonder to me why many people will donate thousands of dollars to college sports but very little to college academic scholarships. There has always been the undertone of money going to athletes to attract them to specific schools and now and then we would see punishment given to schools for this. Now it has been deemed that giving money to a high school athlete to attend a college is legal and we see the NIL program spending millions of dollars to buy players with some making more than the professors at the school. People and businesses are spending a lot of money to buy a winning team but that apparently has not been enough. Now the NCAA wants each institution to spend $20,000,000.00 a year to pay players with most of the money going to football and basketball. Each athlete will get free tuition, room and board plus a sizable sum to play football or basketball with a smaller sum going to the other sports, both men's and women's. If you are not an athlete there is no monetary help. Scholarships for academics, music or other fields do not carry any extra compensation. It seems that college sports are more important than the reason the institution exists which is for education.
West Virginia University has accessed each student an extra $125. per semester in their fees to pay for this money to pay its athletes. At first I thought that requiring students to pay for the football team and basketball team was a little too much but then realized that many of the students had to get college loans to pay for their tuition and fees. The university is requiring their students to borrow money to pay their athletes and then requiring the federal government to insure those loans which when defaulted requires the taxpayer to make up the difference. Once again the world of sports has accessed the public to finance the overpaid athletes as we pay high fees to watch TV to see their games. Besides the over abundance of advertising the cost of TV viewing has risen substantially in the last few years with many games moving to streaming which increases the cost. West Virginia games are mostly on a streaming channel which requires a subscription fee to watch. Most of the sports stadia and coliseums were built with a lot of public money. The people of Pittsburgh voted down the wish to build the Steeler's new stadium but the county did it any way. People living paycheck to paycheck help pay for the playground for multimillionaires to play football. Now colleges are asking the public to fund million dollar athletes. The saddest part of this is that after the NIL and university payments to the football team we cannot win a game but the athletes are receiving their money anyway. The students are paying them to lose and the cost of an education is going up again.
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