1 - https://www.usna.edu/Admissions/Student-Life/General-Informa...
Students at the military academies are both on full scholarship (tuition and board paid by the taxpayers) and salaried. After required [non-academic] expenses (uniforms, laundry, etc) the "take home" is tiny. But, that doesn't negate the fact that they are salaried employees of the US government.
And, just to be clear, I'm in no way arguing students at the service academies are over-paid, or shouldn't be paid, or anything like that. I'm just curious if they have an explicit exemption from the NCAA, or if the NCAA isn't following it's own rules.
Hollywood movies often show a loss after the studio deducts all the expensive things they bought themselves. Everybody with points against net gets nothing, but the studio still does just fine.
I don't think Hollywood movies are a good comparison. The studios will play accounting tricks by setting up shell companies for the purposes of screwing over the people who actually made the movie [1]. That's just pushing paper around, though: if the movies makes more than the studio spent, they turned a profit. Universities aren't doing that; many of their football programs are actual money losers, and they get that money from student tuition or the state if it's a public university.
[1] https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20121018/01054720744/holly...
Non-profit doesn't mean “doesn’t earn profits” or “doesn’t prioritize profit”, but “doesn’t return profits to investors”.
I can't find the original HBO Real Sports link, but they go into depth about the Non-profit status and the way the funding is spent. It is a real eye opener and made me rethink how the argument that profit/revenue should be considered when dealing with the larger organizations.
Below are references, but not only highlights.
Why not? The economic value of work to the entity for which it is performed is a significant factor in the criteria under which the law now requires other formerly unpaid, often student, workers such as many interns to be paid, even when their employer is a nonprofit. Why should athletes be treated worse?
EDIT: To clarify, I mean a "practical" difference whether a booster gives money to a school to pay players or gives it to a company to do so. The payer matters to law, not to the paid nor to the practical result.
Personally, I also feel that boosters have too much direct involvement in athletic departments as is. Removing the school from the booster-player relationship and bringing booster payment to players out from under the table could potentially help clean up some of the corruption in college sports.
It needs to be pointed out that this law doesn't allow schools to pay players directly. There probably isn't enough money for that without totally restructuring athletic departments around the country (a football team like USC is wildly profitable, but most of that profit goes to pay for unprofitable teams like swimming, volleyball, etc). Paying players directly also has a number of Title IX repercussions that would likely need to be ironed out in court.
This law instead allows the players a way to make money for themselves based off their participation in sports. That simply frees athletes up in the same way that non-athletes are unrestricted from how they can earn money while in school. No actor is going to be kicked out of their school's theater program because they got $200 for acting in a local car commercial. Now the football player won't either.