Public perceptions on paying student athletes

Abstract

The notion of paying collegiate athletes has been contested and debated for years. Recently, however, several high-profile cases have once again generated negative headlines and as such, discussions of paying student athletes have proliferated among the popular press, college administrators, players themselves, the general public and sport management scholars. The purpose of this study is to compare and contrast the opinions of a nationally recruited sample of respondents to assess their attitudes related to their support of paying student athletes. While the majority of the respondents were congruent in their beliefs with regards to age, sex and level of education, there was a clear difference in respondents' viewpoints based on race. Specifically, Blacks were more than two times as likely as Whites to support payment to student athletes. Findings, implications and suggestions for future research are also examined.

Notes

¹ Farrey, ‘Timeline’.

² Wine, ‘NCAA Confirms Investigation at Miami’.

³ To be sure, the problem of college athlete's receipt of illegal benefits or compensation is not new. Case studies reveal that this has been an ongoing concern since the rise of major collegiate athletics (SMU college football in the mid-1980s), and many hearings, editorials and even legislative efforts have been aimed at dealing with college athlete compensation (see Tom Osborne's attempt at state legislation).

⁴ NCAA (National Collegiate Athletic Association) website, http://ncaa.org/wps/wcm/connect/public/ncaa/about+the+ncaa/who+we+are/about+the+ncaa+history (retrieved February 15, 2001).

⁵ Howard and Crompton, Financing Sport.

⁶ Sports Illustrated, ‘UConn Donor Demands Return of $3M Donation After Pasqualoni hire’.

⁷ Nocera, ‘Lets Start Paying College Athletes’.

⁸ NCAA website, http://ncaa.org/wps/wcm/connect/public/ncaa/about+the+ncaa/who+we+are/about+the+ncaa+history (retrieved February 15, 2011).

⁹ It is important to note that as part of the organization's development and in response to critics calling for academic reform, the NCAA implemented several key academic policies serving as benchmarks for academic progress of student athletes. The NCAA passed Proposition 48 at its 1983 convention as a measure to toughen initial academic eligibility for freshmen student athletes. Upon adoption, Proposition 48 was put into effect for the 1986–1987 academic year (Zimbalist, 1999). Within a couple of years, various stakeholders of college sports, including coaches and athletic administrators, pushed for additional legislation in the form or Proposition 42. Specifically, Proposition 42 allowed potential student athletes categorized as partial qualifiers (those meeting the minimum requirement of either two benchmarks – GPA or SAT scores) to receive full financial aid as long as the funding was outside the athletic department. Both basketball and football coaches were strong proponents of Proposition 42 as this allowed teams to stockpile talented athletes classified as partial qualifiers and more importantly not count against their limited number of available scholarships (Zimbalist, 1999). In 1992, the NCAA again revised their academic requirements with the adoption of Proposition 16. This legislation raised eligibility requirements in two stages involving both GPAs and standardized test scores. Today, the NCAA monitors academic progress of student athletes with policies monitoring academic progress (APR) and graduation success (GSR). Institutions failing to meet specific benchmarks are now subject to sanctions including scholarship reductions.

¹⁰ CNN Money, ‘College football's $1.1 billion profit’.

¹¹ Sperber, ‘College Sports Inc'; Zimbalist, ‘Unpaid Professionals’.

¹² Mahony and Deschriver, ‘The big business of college sports in America’.

¹³ http://catalog proemags.com/publication/0affe96d#/0affe96d/12 (retrieved January 19, 2012).

¹⁴ http://www.ncaa.org/wps/wcm/connect/public/NCAA/Finances/Miscellaneous+Expense+Allowance (retrieved January 19, 2012).

¹⁵ In an attempt to provide several perspectives regarding the compensation levels for those individuals directly involved in the production of revenue in major collegiate sports, essentially the student athletes and coaches, Ramogi and Staurowsky, ‘The Price of Poverty in Big Time College Sport’, recently analysed financial metrics including ‘room and board’, coaching salaries, and revenues produced by each team by calculating the fair market value of college athletes (specifically Football Bowl Series football players and collegiate basketball players), arriving at values worth well over $100,000. On the heels of this and related findings, the National College Players Association recommended de-regulation of the NCAA with a number of provisions, including among other things: supporting legislation that allows universities to fully fund their athletes' educational opportunities with scholarships that fully cover the cost of attendance, lifting restrictions on all college athletes' commercial opportunities by adopting the Olympic amateur model (thus permitting amateur athlete access to the commercial free market) and promoting the adoption of legislation that would allow revenue-producing athletes to receive a portion of new revenues that can be placed in a trust fund of sorts that can be accessed with the intention of helping them complete their college degree (Ramogi and Staurowsky, ‘The Price of Poverty in Big Time College Sport’, 5).

¹⁶ Emmert, ‘Paying College Athletes is a Terrible Idea’.

¹⁷ Emmert, ‘Paying College Athletes is a Terrible Idea’

¹⁸ Mondello and Beckham, ‘Worker's Compensation and Collegiate Athletes’.

¹⁹ Fulks, ‘Revenues and Expenses 2009’.

²⁰ Brown and Jewell, ‘Measuring Marginal Revenue Product of College Athletics’.

²¹ Brown ‘An Estimate of the Rent Generated by a Premium College Football Player’; ‘Measuring Cartel Rents in the College Basketball Player Recruitment Market’.

²² Brown, ‘An Estimate of the Rent Generated by a Premium College Football Player’.

²³ Brown, ‘Measuring Cartel Rents in the College Basketball Player Recruitment Market’.

²⁴ Schneider, ‘College Students’ Perceptions on the Payment of Intercollegiate Student-Athletes'.

²⁵ Buckler and Unnever, ‘Racial and Ethnic Perceptions of Injustice’; Hagan, Shedd, and Payne, 2005, ‘Race, Ethnicity, and Youth Perceptions of Criminal Injustice’.

²⁶ Piquero et al., ‘Race, Punishment and the Michael Vick Experience’.

²⁷ Tourangeau,‘Survey Research and Societal Change’, 778–779.

²⁸ Much like public opinion polls on issues regarding the extent of greenhouse emissions, the amount of fat and calories in school lunches, views on political issues and presidential candidates, and the affordability of college education, our decision to study a national sample was designed to gauge general public perceptions on compensating college athletes. Moreover, as noted earlier, issues associated with higher education and collegiate athletics are not only germane to many citizens (as they are taxpayers in many states), but also because they either directly or indirectly pay for college athletics.

²⁹ Kish, ‘Survey Sampling’.

³⁰ The sampling frame for this research is all the US households with working landline phones. Also, households with landline numbers ported to cellular phones would be included in the sampling frame. Only one member of each household was interviewed. If a juvenile answered the phone, the interviewers asked for a parent to continue the interview.

³¹ AAPOR response rate calculation RR6.

³² American Association for Public Opinion Research, Standard Definitions.

³³ Of increasing concern to survey research is the use of call-screening devices (Tuckell and O'Neill, ‘The Vanishing Respondent in Telephone Surveys’). The Data-Tel predictive dialer used in this research anticipates call-screening devices used to indicate that a household is ineligible, commercially known as a ‘Tele-Zapper’. This software also passes calls that it deems as screened through the use of privacy blockers and screening services to an operator to determine the appropriate disposition code or action. This operator then continues the call normally.

³⁴ An anonymous reviewer asked if the respondents were screened for knowledge of college student athlete compensation, and indeed they were. If respondents did not have such knowledge, they were instructed to respond with ‘don't know’ or ‘insufficient knowledge’ on the compensation question. Only 19 cases selected this option, and they were set as ‘missing’. Thus, over 95% of the original sample was retained for the analysis.

³⁵ Hosmer and Lemeshow, ‘Goodness-of-Fit Tests for the Multiple Logistic Regression Model’.

³⁶ For the Hosmer–Lemeshow goodness-of-fit test statistic, observations are grouped into ‘deciles of risk’, in which observations are partitioned into g = 10 equal-size groups based on their ordered estimated probabilities (Archer and Lemeshow, ‘Goodness-of-Fit Test for a Logistic Regression Model Using Survey Sample Data’, 99).

³⁷ These results are not very surprising, especially when compared to extant research examining the demographic factors associated with public perceptions of crime and punishment.

³⁸ We also re-estimated the logistic regression model with an alternative operationalization for race/ethnicity, this time comparing Whites/non-Whites. The results of these analyses were virtually identical to those reported in the text for the Black/non-Black results; that is, non-Whites were significantly more likely than Whites to believe that college student athletes should be financially compensated.

³⁹ For example, the Pew Research Center, ‘Section 3: Demographics and News Sources’, reports that while Whites tend to be well represented across various political typologies that span the liberal–conservative continuum (e.g., solid liberals, new coalition democrats, main street republicans and staunch conservatives), and that Blacks tend to be mainly represented among liberals (e.g., hard-pressed democrats and new coalition democrats), it is strikingly the case that Whites are highly over-represented among ‘main street republicans’ and ‘staunch conservatives’ (Pew Research Center, ‘Section 3: Demographics and News Sources’).

⁴⁰ See for example, Graham and Lowery, ‘Priming unconscious racial stereotypes about adolescent offenders’.

⁴¹ Liska, ‘Social Threat and Social Control’.

⁴² Unnever, Cullen, and Jonson, ‘Race, racism, and support for capital punishment’.

⁴³ Adair, Taylor, and Darcy ‘Managing Ethnocultural and ‘Racial’ Diversity in Sport’; Eagleman, ‘Stereotypes of Race and Nationality’; Ross, ‘Race and Sport’; Sailes, ‘An Investigation of Campus Stereotypes’; Wiggins, ‘Great Speed but Little Stamina’.

⁴⁴ Hylton, ‘How a Turn to Critical Race Theory can Contribute to Our Understanding of ‘Race’, Racism, and Anti-Racism in Sport’.

⁴⁵ Singer, ‘Understanding Racism Through the Eyes of African American Male Student’.

⁴⁶ See Agyemang, Singer, and DeLorme, ‘An Exploratory Study of Black Male College Athletes’ Perceptions on Race and Athlete Activism'.

⁴⁷ Hacker, Two Nations, 252.

⁴⁸ Kinder and Sanders, Divided by Color.

⁴⁹ All of this would need to be considered with the stark differences in the racial/ethnic makeup of college/professional sporting events, especially football and basketball, which tend to be predominantly attended by Whites (Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, ‘The Black-White Divide in Cultural Pursuits’).

⁵⁰ An anonymous reviewer raised the interesting idea of examining fan-extreme involvement and the perceptions these individuals have with respect to NCAA legislation. Given the myriad NCAA policies in place as well as the various options discussed and ultimately considered, such an investigation would be especially illuminating.

⁵¹ Lapchick, The 2010 Racial and Gender Report Card.

⁵² Anshel, ‘Perceptions of Black Intercollegiate Football Players’.

⁵³ Long, ‘Spurrier, Others Propose Paying Football Players’.

⁵⁴ Wolff, ‘A Smart Way to Share’, 14.