The behavior of the NCAA: A question of ethics

Abstract

The National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) is commonly viewed as a safety net for individual athletes, for universities, and for inter-collegiate sports programs. They help reduce injury to athletes, they participate in the marketing of athletic events, and they continue to change the rules of college sport to make it more fun for the spectators. There is another view that argues the NCAA is a buyers' cartel or monopsonist that engages in price-fixing for colleges and universities. The prices they fix are the wages of student athletes and they accomplish this through regulations that prohibit the athlete from receiving any income other than in-kind scholarship payments. Students who receive other kinds of scholarships are not subject to these same restrictions. For example, students who receive scholarships in music can and do augment their income by performing for pay. It is the opinion of some that these price fixing scholarship agreements limiting the income of student athletes discriminates against a whole class of scholarship recipients. They also believe that this kind of behavior on the part of colleges and universities that make up the membership of the NCAA is highly unethical and may even be illegal.