Reforms We’re Cheering For in 2025

James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal ^ | December 30, 2024

[karpov]

Each year at this time, the staff of the Martin Center share our higher-ed-reform dreams for the coming 12 months. Will all of our wishes come true? Probably not. Nevertheless, we offer them here in a spirit of optimism, for the reader’s enjoyment and edification.

Keep Title IX Out of College-Sports Revenue Sharing

Last year, the Boston College Law Review (BCLR) published an article on the “equity implications” of paying college athletes, a topic made pressing by Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s NCAA v. Alston concurrence and the related settlement of House v. NCAA.

As a review, Kavanaugh joined in full the Court’s 2021 decision that NCAA restrictions on player “name, image, and likeness” compensation violated antitrust law. Yet he noted separately that the NCAA’s entire business model, which bars student athletes from direct participation in profit sharing, “would be flatly illegal in almost any other industry in America.” House v. NCAA, scheduled for settlement finalization in April, promises to change that template. Henceforth, college athletes will receive up to 22 percent of ticket, television, and sponsorship revenue, a sum that will amount to billions of dollars a year.

Though the resulting divvying up will be hugely complicated, BCLR’s question was relatively simple: Do current Title IX regulations require equal payouts to male and female athletes? The law review’s answer, based on a close reading of current guidance, was “no.” Thus, the authors suggested, the Department of Education should issue new rules ensuring that men and women receive “proportionately equal payments for their athletic services.”

This would be a terrible idea. Subjugating free markets to highly politicized notions of “fairness” usually is.

[whitney69]

“proportionately equal payments for their athletic services.”

A number things here:

First is that if they decide to pay the atheletes, if they don’t produce can they be fired? Should this payment be called a salary or a scholorship? As employees of the colleges, do they recieve medical bennies or other warm fuzzies to get them to play for the college. Can the term play even stay when they are paid to work?

But the funny thing is that if the sexes are paid proportionately with them as employees, it is really going to change the amount of payment going to the colleges as it has to be budgeted. So the money is removed from education and goes into the hands of kids that are playing. And how far is it going to go? Do high school athletes deserve to be paid also? Oh, this worm can is big but smaller than the payout. So when does it reach a point of a sport going insolvent and being removed after the years of finding funds to cover their losses in a paricular sport just to be equal? So much for gender identification.

wy69

[libertylover]

Colleges and universities, particularly public institutions, should also find ways to recognize [the 250th anniversary] this momentous occasion.

More likely they'll weaponize this momentous occasion and I won't be surprised if colleges and universities help with the "Let's Hate America" BLM protests/riots, especially "elite" colleges.

[Albion Wilde]

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