You keep using that word9/28/2023 ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() As a University of Virginia grad, I can assure our admissions office turned a blind eye every now and again for a particularly sterling prospect. Plus, you get to go to Duke! I know that they pride themselves on taking smart athletes, but it's hard to believe they don't relax their standards just a little for that extra-talented player every now and then. Tuition costs, however, are not zero: Duke University, to choose an example entirely at random, estimates that its yearly annual cost is $60,000. The idea that elite, scholarship-earning college basketball players are working for "free" is, by and large, a nutty one.* "Free" presupposes that tuition costs are zero. The only amateurs around are the players. The advertisers aren't amateurs, the TV stations aren't amateurs, the coaches aren't amateurs, the athletic directors aren't amateurs. The tournament is the subject of a $10.8 billion broadcast rights deal and the major programs get additional broadcast revenue for their regular season and conference tournament play. But there's nothing amateur about the sport. On the rhetorical level, the players don't get paid because of "amateurism". Today is the start of the annual NCAA men's basketball tournament- one of the most-pernicious but least-scrutinized forms of working for free that exists in the United States of America today. The latest iteration of this argument comes from Matt Yglesias: Forcing someone to work for free is wrong. There is probably no argument in the world I find more aggravating than the one that goes something like this: "Scholarship college athletes work for free because they do not get paid. ![]()
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