What Effect Will Paying College Athletes Have on the Fans?

Earlier this year, the NCAA finalized an agreement that settled three pending federal antitrust cases and answered a long-running discussion over college sports — namely, whether or not student athletes would be compensated for their work. The agreement, as ESPN reported, allowed colleges and universities in the Power 5 conferences to directly pay athletes, with the schools in question now able to each spend up to $22 million per year.

The movement to pay college athletes — or at least those playing at the highest level — has been gaining ground ever since the 2011 publication of an article in The Atlantic by Taylor Branch outlining the case for it. The recent settlement opened the door to another question: how are athletic powerhouses going to come up with the money that they’ll soon be using to pay players? The answer, unsurprisingly, could involve raising ticket prices to games — and that’s just one way universities are responding.

In a wide-ranging article for the Associated Press, Eddie Pells explored the different ways in which schools are raising revenue for player compensation. This includes everything from appeals to boosters to a small tuition increase for all students at one university (Clemson). Other universities are opting for or exploring more time-honored ways of raising money: hiking up ticket prices, adding premium seating to an existing stadium or making concessions more expensive.

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Given that a number of colleges and universities have made substantial cuts to academic programs as of late, it isn’t hard to foresee some contentious conversations if — for example — a university winds up cutting a department in order to have more money on hand for its athletic programs. It also raises the question of whether some schools might reduce their commitment to sports, as Hofstra University did with its football program in 2009 and others have done more recently.

There’s a delicate balance to college athletics at the highest level. They can create a sense of community, but successfully running an athletic program is a very different skill than successfully running an institution of higher learning. This latest development could increase the tension of that contradiction — and could take the entire system into uncharted territory.