Calls for College Athlete Pay Increasing.

• Position: SPORTSCENE

More Americans than not believe that college athletes should be allowed to be paid more than what it costs them to go to school, indicate findings from the National Sports and Society Survey. The survey indicates that 51% of adults agree that college athletes should have the ability to be paid above school costs; 41 % disagree; and eight percent do not know.

An analysis of the survey results, published in the Sociology of Sport Journal, found a variety of factors were linked to how Americans thought about the issue. "We found that it was largely a story of race, ethnicity, views about discrimination in society, and traditionalism," says lead author Chris Knoester, associate professor of sociology at Ohio State University, Columbus, who conducted the study with David Ridpath, associate professor of sports management at Ohio University, Athens.

"A lot of the same issues concerning race that we're dealing with in the larger society seem to have played a role in how people felt about college athletes' economic rights. We didn't want to get into details about how to organize compensation. We just wanted to know if people thought it should be possible for college students to be paid as athletes."

The survey also asked a variety of questions designed to uncover the factors associated with support for paying athletes. Results show that the odds for white adults to agree strongly that college athletes should receive compensation beyond their scholarships are 36% lower than the odds for nonwhite adults.

When these differences are broken down further, black adults had odds of strongly agreeing that college athletes should be paid more than it costs them to go to school that are 2.5 times those of white adults. Hispanics also are more...