For decades, college athletics was framed around the idea of the amateur “student-athlete”: someone who competes for their school while remaining, first and foremost, a student. In today’s highest-revenue-accruing sports, that ideal has become increasingly difficult to believe.
Major college athletics have modernized financially and athletically, but the model imposed on athletes has remained outdated. In the most demanding sports, especially basketball and football, athletes operate within a professional-style system while being expected to live under the NCAA’s amateur academic model. A better college sports framework would give athletes the choice to separate their academic timeline from their athletic one. Some athletes may still want to take classes during the season or stay on a traditional four-year academic path, and they should be allowed to do so. But others should have the option to reduce their course load, focus primarily on competition during their playing careers, and return to complete their degrees afterward at no additional cost.
Elite college athletics demand the same level of commitment as professional organizations. Top football and basketball players train year-round and spend countless hours in practices, workouts, and film study. The average Division-I football player spends roughly 42 hours per week on their sport, although the NCAA only allows 20 per week. That workload rivals the time commitment of a full-time job, making it increasingly difficult for athletes to prioritize academics during the season. It’s one thing to have a few classes scheduled during the offseason to be somewhat academically on track with their peers who aren’t pursuing a sport. It’s another thing to expect them to carry a full academic workload during the season given their athletic commitments.
The academic outcomes of many elite collegiate athletes reflect these overwhelming demands. Many struggle to complete their degrees while balancing the responsibilities of what resembles a full-time career. That issue is often obscured by the way the NCAA presents student-athletes’ academic success. Even the NCAA’s preferred graduation metrics, which do not account for many athletes who transfer out and later fail to earn a degree elsewhere, still show football and basketball consistently posting some of the lowest graduation rates compared to all other sports. By grouping all sports together, however, the NCAA can still point to strong overall graduation numbers while masking the different realities of athletes in the most demanding and commercialized sports. A tennis player, rower, or golfer may still fit the traditional student-athlete model, but a football or basketball player often operates under a completely different level of expectations for physical intensity, media exposure, and time commitment.
However, this trend does not necessarily apply to all schools. At UC San Diego, for example, “scholar-athletes” are expected to succeed in the classroom as well as in competition, and many rise to the challenge. Their average cumulative GPA is “comparable” to the rest of the student body, and the women’s basketball team — which has accomplished record-breaking feats in the past two years — had a Winter Quarter average GPA of 3.62. This is exactly why the national student-athlete model should not be treated as one size fits all. A model that fits many of the athletes at UCSD does not automatically fit all athletes at all other universities.
The only remaining aspect of “amateurism” in major college athletics is the expectation that athletes continue balancing the responsibilities of full-time students while helping generate enormous profits for universities, conferences, and television networks. The commercialization of college athletics has only intensified these pressures. Some head coaches at major programs earn seven-figure salaries comparable to those of professional coaches. Television contracts worth billions of dollars now dominate the landscape of college football and basketball, while universities invest enormous sums into coaching salaries, luxury facilities, and national branding campaigns. Today’s athletic departments operate as profit-maximizing businesses rather than purely educational institutions.
Name, image, and likeness deals have also transformed elite athletes into marketable public figures capable of signing endorsement contracts and monetizing their personal brands, all while still being college students. Even UCSD has entered this new landscape. In 2025, UCSD Athletics endorsed the SD Tide Collective, an NIL-focused group supporting men’s and women’s basketball players.
This shift away from traditional amateurism was inevitable. For decades, universities, coaches, and television networks profited enormously from college sports while athletes themselves were prohibited from earning money through endorsements, sponsorships, or the use of their own names, images, and likenesses. NIL policies finally acknowledged the economic reality that elite athletes possess market value beyond the classroom. Since major college sports already operate like professional entertainment industries, the next logical step may be formal contracts that recognize athletes as employees during their playing careers.
Society already recognizes that mastering highly demanding fields requires specialization and focus. If we do not expect full-time employees to carry a complete college course load while meeting the demands of their jobs, then we should not expect athletes in these sports to perform like professionals while remaining on the same academic timeline as traditional students. The real myth of amateurism is no longer that college sports are untouched by money. It is that athletes can be placed inside a professionalized system and still be expected to move through college like everyone else.
