Key takeaways:

• The growing revenue of college sports and the heightened attention on the experience of college athletes suggest that college athletics is far from the amateur endeavor it might have started as decades ago.
• Recent policy changes have allowed some college athletes to receive compensation, whether in the form of name, image, and likeness (NIL) rights or revenue sharing. However, not all college athletes have the right to be compensated.
• The NCAA has backed the SCORE Act, which would jeopardize college athlete compensation by prohibiting them from being classified as employees in the first place.
• Policymakers should consider proposals that strengthen rights for college athletes, including granting them employee status under federal labor laws.

Introduction

It has long been argued that college athletes should not receive compensation to maintain the “amateurism” of college sports. However, the growing revenue generated from college sports and heightened attention on the experience of college athletes suggest that college athletics is far from an amateur endeavor.

Only recently have college athletes been granted the right to be compensated for name, image, and likeness (NIL) rights. This decision came into effect after years of antitrust lawsuits against the National Collegiate Athletic Association’s (NCAA) compensation rules. These lawsuits culminated in the Supreme Court decision in NCAA v. Alston, as well as a growing number of states enacting their own compensation laws for college athletes. The recent House v. NCAA settlement allows Division I schools—those with the largest and most economically lucrative athletic programs—to share revenue with college athletes, and further expands opportunities for college athletes to receive compensation.

As a result of these policy changes and a growing movement among college athletes to demand fair compensation for their performance, federal policymakers have put forward proposals to address college athlete compensation. In this blog post, we examine these proposals and their impacts on college athletes and their labor/employment status.

A brief history of college athlete compensation

Despite claims of “amateurism” in college sports, the experience of college athletes showcases a reality in which athletics is prioritized over academics. For example, while the NCAA puts limits on how many hours college athletes can engage in athletic-related activities during playing season, many coaches create expectations for students to exceed these limits, with some athletes exceeding over 40 hours per week. News coverage has reported that coaches have issued fines to athletes who miss practices. Many college athletes are also required to travel for their games, forcing them to miss classes. If college athletes fail to meet these expectations, they may be cut from the team, which could jeopardize future scholarships and other academic opportunities.

Simply put, some college athletes are expected to perform a physical regimen that more closely resembles professional sports than amateur endeavors on top of their academic coursework. The athletic commitment is demanding enough to be its own job, yet college athletes are performing them without any meaningful compensation in return.

In recent years, there have been several policy changes related to college athlete compensation. In 2019, California became the first state to pass a law that granted college athletes NIL rights. The NCAA permitted NIL compensation in 2021 and since then, more than 30 states have enacted laws related to college athlete compensation, with remaining states deferring to NCAA rules to regulate such compensation.

A primary driver of the NCAA’s change of rules regarding NIL compensation was the 2021 Supreme Court decision in NCAA v. Alston. The unanimous decision upheld a lower court decision that found the NCAA’s rules restricting certain educational benefits for college athletes violated federal antitrust laws. In a concurring opinion, Justice Brett Kavanaugh questioned “whether the NCAA’s remaining compensation rules can pass muster under ordinary rule of reason scrutiny” and suggested collective bargaining as an avenue for college athletes to receive a fairer share of the revenue that they generate for their schools. Soon after the NCAA v. Alston decision, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) General Counsel Jennifer Abruzzo issued a memorandum taking the position that college athletes are employees under the National Labor Relations Act.

In response to this memo, men’s basketball players at Dartmouth College filed for a union election petition at the NLRB; however, the petition was withdrawn shortly after the 2024 presidential election. In January 2025, Acting General Counsel William Cowen rescinded Abruzzo’s memorandum, leaving college athletes’ employee status in limbo.

The House v. NCAA settlement, which allowed Division I schools to share revenue directly with college athletes, was another turning point in the college athlete compensation landscape. The majority of states with college athlete compensation laws have considered legislation to modify their statues to reflect the terms of the House settlement, but not all have done so.

Who are college athletes?

The National Collegiate Athletic Association is the governing body for college athletics in the United States, overseeing sports programs for 557,000 college athletes at more than 1,100 colleges. It organizes institutions into three divisions based on size, athletic scope, and financial resources. Division I schools are the largest, with the most extensive athletic programs and highest scholarship limits. Approximately 37% of college athletes compete for Division I schools. Division II schools offer fewer scholarships and financial resources, while Division III has the greatest share of college athletes (38%), but offers no athletic scholarships.

During the 2024–2025 school year, the college athlete population was 57% male and 43% female. These young men and women are diverse: 61% are white, 16% are Black, 7% are Hispanic or Latino, 7% report more than two races, and 2% are Asian. Breaking down demographics by race and gender, we find that white males make up the largest group at 32%, followed by white females at 28%, Black males at 12%, and Black females at 4%. The remaining athletes fall into other demographic categories. If we focus on men’s basketball and men’s football athletes at the highest revenue-earning,1 there are 11,504 total athletes, 32% of whom are white and 48% of whom are Black, with the remaining athletes falling into an “other” race category.

Figure A

In terms of geography, college athletes tend to be from the most populous states. According to estimates using NCAA data and population data from Census, most student-athletes are from California, Texas, Florida, New York, and Pennsylvania (in descending order). On a per capita basis, it is Georgia, North Carolina, and Michigan (in descending order) that produce the highest rates of college athletes. This is likely due to having several large state universities with strong athletic programs and an impressive high school sports infrastructure. NCAA-affiliated institutions are also concentrated in the populous states, but especially among states in the Northeast. The states with the most NCAA schools are Pennsylvania (96), New York (93), California (59), Texas (53), and Massachusetts (51).

Current policy landscape

As mentioned above, many states have enacted laws that grant college athletes NIL rights. In the wake of the House v. NCAA settlement, there have been calls for federal policymakers to pass legislation addressing college athlete compensation.

One of the most prominent pieces of federal legislation is the Student Compensation and Opportunity through Rights and Endorsements (SCORE) Act. Backed by the NCAA, this bill would prohibit college athletes from being classified as employees, denying basic labor rights to over half a million young people. The bill creates a federal standard for NIL rights. In doing so, the SCORE Act preempts state legislation concerning college athlete compensation, creating a ceiling rather than a floor for setting standards around college athlete compensation. Further, the SCORE Act limits the types of NIL deals athletes can enter, places caps on NIL payments, and restricts athletes’ abilities to transfer and play at new schools. Finally, the bill would grant the NCAA broad antitrust immunity by authorizing them to limit revenue sharing and education-related benefits to athletes.

On April 3, 2026, President Trump issued an executive order on college athletics. Similar to the SCORE Act, the order directs the NCAA to tighten rules on transfers, eligibility, and NIL compensation, threatening noncompliant schools with the loss of federal funding. It does not, however, address whether college athletes are employees (an earlier executive order from Trump directed the Department of Labor and National Labor Relations Board to clarify employee status of college athletes). Multiple lawyers have argued the latest executive order would not survive a legal challenge. The NCAA president nonetheless praised it, and both the administration and conference commissioners are using the order to push Congress to pass the SCORE Act.

The Student Athlete Fairness & Enforcement (SAFE) Act is another proposal that seeks to codify a federal standard for NIL rights. However, unlike the SCORE Act, the SAFE Act establishes strong health and safety protections for college athletes, allows flexibility for transfers, and places penalties on bad actor agents, among other reforms. Furthermore, the bill does not address college athletes’ employee status or shield the NCAA from antitrust liability.

By far the most effective policy solution for college athletes to be fairly compensated is to grant them the right to form unions and bargain collectively. Legislation like the College Athlete Right to Organize Act  would classify college athletes as employees, granting them the right to form unions and bargaining collectively under the National Labor Relations Act. The bill would also amend the NLRA to define public colleges—in addition to private colleges—as an employer in the context of intercollegiate sports so that all college athletes have the right to organize and collectively bargain.

Below we evaluate whom these proposals impact and estimate how much revenue the college sports industry generates under current compensation policies.

College athlete demographics versus college attendee demographics

College sports are frequently presented as disproportionately Black, but the data show a slightly different story. Black college athletes make up roughly 16% (89,000) of all college athletes compared with 13% (3.31 million) of the total college student population, not significantly different from the NCAA share. Hispanics are drastically underrepresented in the NCAA, accounting for only 7% of college athletes, despite representing over 20% of total college enrollment. In fact, it is white college athletes, and white male athletes in particular, who are disproportionately represented in college athletics: While 61% of college athletes are white and 32% are white males, only 48% of all college students are white and only 19.1% are white males. Notably, it is Black female athletes who are left out of NCAA college athletics at the highest rates. While they account for 8.3% of total college enrollment (2.14 million), they are only 4.5% of total college athletes in the NCAA (25,000).

Figure B How much do collegiate sports make?

By far, the most economically lucrative division in the NCAA is Division I sports, which includes 37% of total athletes but generates 96% of total revenue across the three divisions, according to the NCAA. According to the Knight-Newhouse College Athletics Database (an authoritative source on college athletics finances and a better representation of self-generated revenue), Division I schools generated $14.6 billion during the 2024 fiscal year. For context, of the five major professional sports leagues in the United States, only the NFL generated more revenue than Division I schools did during the same time period. The NFL, MLB, NBA, NHL, and MLS generated $22.2 billion, $12.8 billion, $12.3 billion, $6.6 billion, and $2.2 billion, respectively, in fiscal year 2024. The primary revenue sources for NCAA Division I are media rights (27%), donor contributions (22%), ticket sales (15%), and institutional support (14%). NCAA Division I revenue has grown 115% (in 2024$) since 2015.

Figure C

Due to the House v. NCAA settlement, schools gained the ability to share revenue directly with athletes beginning in the 2025–2026 school year, adding to any third-party NIL earnings athletes may receive. Though official figures for both revenue sharing and NIL deals are unavailable, schools are currently capped at $20.5 million under the revenue-sharing agreement. Not every university joined the new revenue-sharing arrangement, but every Power 4 school did (the 68 universities in the four highest revenue-generating conferences). Under the generous assumption that all Power 4 schools share the full $20.5 million with their athletes, this would amount to approximately $1.394 billion in athlete earnings, or about 15.1% of total revenue across these conferences. For comparison, coaches at the same set of schools receive $2.3 billion in compensation or 19% of total expenditure. However, if implemented as intended, the revenue-sharing agreement would be a step-up for revenue-generating athletes. Prior to House v. NCAA, the most Power 4 schools could provide the athletes was $2 to 4 million dollars in athletic scholarship money.

Conclusion

Despite the growing revenue that athletes are generating for college sports, many college athletes are not being compensated for their work. Recent policy changes have allowed some college athletes to receive compensation, whether in the form of NIL rights or revenue sharing. However, the reality is that not all college athletes have the opportunity to be compensated. Federal policy proposals, such as the SCORE Act, would further jeopardize college athlete compensation by prohibiting them from being classified as employees in the first place. It is bad policy to deny any worker basic labor rights. Policymakers should consider proposals that strengthen rights for college athletes, including granting them employee status under federal labor laws.

Acknowledgments

The authors thank the Notre Dame Student Policy Network (SPN) for their contributions to the background research for this blog post. The authors would like to thank Billy Bonnist and Liesl Erhardt for leading the SPN team, which included Sarah Francis, Evan Fitzpatrick, Ciara Gilligan, Anvita Jaipura, Owen Murphy, and Caroline Streicker.

1. Defined as the Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS) autonomy schools or schools in the Power 4 (formerly Power 5) conferences. It is worth acknowledging that other sports also produce significant revenue, including women’s basketball, softball, men’s baseball, and women’s volleyball.

Quibbling with headlines is annoying, I know, but I was provoked by the title of economist Jason Furman’s New York Times piece last week: “Every President Tries It. It Never Works.” The “it” being referred to here is “reversing the loss of manufacturing jobs.”

The provocation was the “every president tries” part. If “trying” is defined as changing policy to consistently support employment growth in U.S. manufacturing, no president has tried in my lifetime to do this. Amazingly, doing nothing has indeed failed. Doing nothing was also the wrong choice.

The loss of manufacturing jobs

First, some data to define the problem. Furman focuses on the share of total employment that is in manufacturing. He notes that many structural non-policy forces (like technology and what people demand as countries get richer) put steady downward pressure on this in any growing country. There’s a lot of truth in that.

But the U.S. got much richer between 1965 and 2000—in fact it got richer at a far faster pace than it has since, so both technology and the different demands of a richer society should have been operating a lot less intensely since then. And yet the level of U.S. manufacturing employment was steady during that period, fluctuating roughly between 17.0 and 19.5 million depending on the state of the business cycle (see Figure A). After 35 years of stability, manufacturing jobs then cratered: 3 million manufacturing jobs were lost after the recession of 2001, and the 2003–2007 recovery saw essentially no gain at all in manufacturing jobs—the first manufacturing jobless recovery we’ve ever experienced. Then another 3 million jobs were lost during the Great Recession of 2008–09.

After falling from over 17 million to just over 11 million between 2000 and 2010, the sector has seen only very slow growth since. The new high point of manufacturing employment in the recent past was 12.9 million workers in early 2023.

Figure A

Manufacturing historically lost a disproportionate share of jobs during recessions, but what kept it from gaining jobs back quickly in the early 2000s and 2010s recoveries the way it usually had? One huge influence was the emergence of a large trade deficit in manufactured goods. In those decades, the deficit peaked at 4.4% of GDP in 2005 (see Figure B). After being forced into improvement by the Great Recession and the collapse of American spending on all goods and services (including imports), it has steadily moved back toward this peak and surpassed it in recent years.

Figure B

Policy measures can close the trade deficit and reshore manufacturing jobs

Tolerating this rise of the U.S. trade deficit was a policy choice. The deficit’s rise was driven by a dollar whose value is too high to allow balanced trade. A high dollar makes our exports expensive to foreign consumers and makes foreign imports cheap for U.S. residents. Hence, it leads directly to chronic trade deficits (see Figure C). Any serious effort at boosting manufacturing employment would require using policy levers to reduce the value of the U.S. dollar.

Figure C

What are these currency policy levers? First, policy would need to prevent other countries’ governments from actively managing the value of their currency to give their exports a competitive advantage against U.S.-produced goods. There are many ways to do this. Currency management is done through other countries’ governments (or their proxies) buying U.S. dollar-denominated assets (like Treasury bonds or mortgage-backed securities) to bid up the demand for dollars. There’s no particular reason the U.S. couldn’t undertake countervailing currency intervention and buy other countries’ assets whenever they bought ours in an effort to manage their currency’s value. Or we could tax foreign purchases of U.S. assets.

Second, we could raise taxes domestically to close fiscal deficits. In coming years unless we run into a recession (which the Iran conflict makes more likely), there is likely to be sustained upward pressure on interest rates stemming from the big increases in fiscal deficits locked in by the Republican mega tax and spending bill. Higher interest rates in the U.S. will attract foreign investors to U.S. assets, which will bid up the value of the U.S. dollar further and harm manufacturing.

Third, we could hasten the inevitable deflation of the AI-driven stock market bubble, which has attracted foreign investors looking to make high returns. All else equal, there would be less upward pressure on the U.S. dollar if foreign investors were not rushing in to buy dollars to purchase U.S. stocks.

Fourth, we could accelerate the transition to cleaner energy. The U.S. has swung from being a large net importer to a net exporter of oil and natural gas. This has greatly increased foreign demand for U.S. dollars simply to buy our energy supplies, which pushes up the value of the dollar and hurts U.S. manufacturing.

Finally, we could reform our corporate tax code to stop its bias toward offshoring both paper profits and real production. The swing toward a large trade deficit in the pharmaceuticals sector, for example, can be linked directly to the first Trump administration’s changes in the corporate tax code.

In short, taking currency seriously would mean going against some very powerful economic interests—finance, tech, pharmaceuticals, and fossil fuels—in the name of helping U.S. manufacturing. But it would be a good trade to make. And to be clear, dollar weakness that is caused not by intentional policy decisions but is simply an outcome of erratic policy decisions will not provide any sustained benefits to U.S. manufacturing. U.S. manufacturing needs a competitive value of the dollar and a healthy and stable domestic economy. Engineering dollar decline by sabotaging the stability of the domestic economy does not help.

How many jobs could be reshored if currency policy somehow closed the U.S. manufacturing trade deficit? Very roughly it would be close to 3 million. This would not change the long-run trend in the manufacturing share of employment, but it would boost manufacturing-based communities around the country.

Indifference to manufacturing was bad for economic dynamism

The long-run gains to rebuilding communities of manufacturing process knowledge in the U.S. could be large. U.S. losses and China’s growing dominance in manufacturing are in large part a story of deconstructing communities of process knowledge in the U.S. and building them in China. These communities are geographic clusters where firms and workers specialize in particular manufacturing sub-sectors. The agglomeration of knowledge and skills leads to steady innovation which further locks in the competitive advantage of the cluster and raises productivity growth.

Currency policy destroyed these clusters in the U.S. and provided ample space for them to grow in China. The large and constant pressure of an overvalued dollar in the U.S. imposes a heavy drag on the prospects of new manufacturing firms setting up shop and becoming a center for clusters like these. The currency policy of China surely acted as the reverse of this, clearing huge competitive space for new entrants and for further growth in communities of process knowledge.

Currency management was not China’s only industrial policy measure, but it is the one that allowed an across-the-board competitive advantage in all manufacturing industries. And it is the only industrial policy in the U.S. that would reclaim some of the across-the-board manufacturing disadvantage we’ve allowed to be imposed on our domestic industry. Targeted protection and subsidies for particular sub-industries in manufacturing have been important in crafting the exact patterns of trade, but it is currency policy that largely explains the manufacturing-wide trade deficit that the U.S. runs with China and other countries that manage their currency.

How big is this problem of losing expertise and process knowledge in manufacturing for the overall economy? Another sign of the indifference towards manufacturing shown by successive U.S. policymakers is that we don’t even really know—and this indifference and the ignorance it generates has grown over the past year of the Trump administration. The manufacturing sector used to be a source of productivity dynamism in the U.S. economy, but recent data indicate that as we hemorrhaged millions of jobs we also saw declining productivity growth in the sector. This productivity decline might not be entirely genuine—it might be a problem with statistical measurement. It would be nice to invest in our data-gathering infrastructure to shed more light on this issue, but instead the parts of the Bureau of Labor Statistics who have the expertise to do this have been gutted by the Trump administration and longer-run cuts. Another angle of taking manufacturing seriously would be supporting the public structures that provide needed inputs to know what’s even happening in the sector.

Doing nothing was a mistake

U.S. presidents have made the implicit judgement over the past 50 years that it’s a good trade for Americans to have a smaller domestic manufacturing sector in return for cheap imports of manufactured goods, even if that means we’re running chronic large trade deficits. It’s not so obvious to me that’s a good trade, and there’s one last angle that makes it even less obvious.

The foreign inflow of capital that is the mirror image of the trade deficit in manufactured goods is essentially investors abroad bidding against Americans who are looking to buy stocks and bonds and other assets to build their wealth. Bidding up the price of these assets means long-run returns will be lower. In short, this current system of trade imbalances lowers the returns to holding wealth for U.S. residents. One could argue that this is mostly a problem for wealthy U.S. households, who own the lion’s share of assets.

But there is also the issue of why the valuation of U.S. assets has grown in recent decades even aside from increased foreign demand. A huge part of this growth is a zero-sum transfer of income from labor earnings to corporate profits: Recent estimates have this transfer accounting for almost half of the entire nominal growth in the value of U.S. corporate equities in the last 40 years.

Absent foreign demand for U.S. assets, some of this loss to wages would have been counterbalanced for at least some subset of U.S. households by higher rates of return to their savings. To be clear, this zero-sum transfer from wages to wealth still would have been a negative development for the vast majority within the U.S. economy. But this transfer combined with the fact that most of the gains accrue to investors outside of the U.S. because of imbalances in trade and investment flows make it even more damaging. Essentially, U.S. households as workers feel all the pain of a campaign of wage suppression, but U.S. households as investors do not claim all of the benefits of this wage suppression.

Presidents have not tried to reverse manufacturing job loss

In the end, no president in my lifetime has made a serious and consistent effort to do what is necessary to make the U.S. dollar stay at values commensurate with balanced trade in manufacturing. Ronald Reagan famously negotiated the Plaza Accord, which pressured Germany and Japan (our two biggest trade-deficit partners at the time) to reflate their own economies and to stop currency intervention. But at the same time, Reagan ramped up military spending and made large tax cuts that put huge upward pressure on interest rates and led to huge trade deficits in the early 1980s. Bill Clinton oversaw smaller fiscal deficits but actively encouraged a “strong dollar policy” which saw the dollar hit some of its highest levels on record. This strong dollar policy and support for a punitive rescue package for countries slammed by the Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s led to another large increase in U.S. trade deficits. The Clinton administration’s support for permanent normalized trade relations (PNTR) with China and for China’s entry into the World Trade Organization (WTO) made it harder for subsequent administrations to apply pressure to China to abandon its significant currency management in the 2000s.

George W. Bush refused to address the Chinese currency management and undertook large tax cuts and increased military spending again, pushing up interest rates and leading to another round of large trade deficits. Barack Obama similarly failed to address currency management, even leaving it out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement he pushed hard in his final years in office. Donald Trump passed corporate tax changes that actively incentivized offshoring in his first term in office. His major trade policy change in the second term has been chaotic and fluctuating—though generally high and broad—tariffs across manufacturing. Manufacturing employment in 2025 averaged 157,000 lower than in 2024 even as the administration trumpeted these large tariff increases. That constitutes the worst non-recessionary year for manufacturing since 2004.

Furman is right that we have seen consistent presidential failure to support employment in manufacturing. And he’s right that most of these presidents made some rhetorical commitment to manufacturing that makes this failure jarring. But nothing serious was ever really tried, and that was a costly mistake.