College Athletes

I think there is bad reasoning on both sides. Please mentally add these thoughts to subsequent discussions.

Colleges make a lot of money off these players. Not really.  Students provide the labor, but most of them are interchangeable. People come out to watch the program, which is the school and the coach.  This year attendance is up a little wherever Zion Williamson goes, because he is great to watch and one of those sure-fire AD,KD, Lebron talents.  No one else is moving the dial. In football, A&M and Michigan and everyone else in the Top 20 are going to sell out and sell merchandise no matter who plays.

These players are being given enough because it's a very valuable scholarship. Maybe.  For a smarter player, it is an opportunity to get a degree without debt, and maybe a local reputation that will help you get a job.  But there are players who just don't have the intelligence to benefit from the education, so it's just pretend to say say that the school is giving them anything. There are varieties of smart, and the better financial advisors teach students to maximise their attractiveness by creating networks while they are on the team. Rich alumni will often be glad to get to know them and give them advice then. That's less likely to happen after you've been gone three years. Make friends with the smartest students you know. Join clubs that are completely out of your comfort zone. Go and cheer at the games of less-prestigious sports. All that is fine, even if the classes are way over your head.  (Though the ones who take that advice are usually the ones smart enough to benefit from classes.) But colleges who bring in students who can't pass a course are not actually providing them with anything except room and board.

Updates Because of further discussions:
1) note that colleges make money off all their students, in some sense.  It doesn't affect the practical aspects of this problem, but it is worth keeping in mind when the focus is only on the money generated by football players (which, we have seen, is not quite what we have been taught to think).
2) Athletes discussing the issue are likely to see it entirely as personal justice, as if college athletics .were like other jobs.  I do work.  My employer benefits.  I should get paid. I have a lot of sympathy for that view, but it does ignore contexts in which the industry is different than others.  Many types of jobs don't fit the market norms in some way.  This is one of them.
3) The system of having colleges operate as minor leagues for professional sports is of course crazy.  But it's not dismantling any time soon, and its mere craziness is not an automatic argument in favor of whatever other idea people come up with.  Well, it's hypocritical to say that a scholarship... Full stop.  Maybe. But the whole thing is built on hypocrisy anyway.  It is a system in which 2+2 is required to equal 5, even though it doesn't.  Starting your argument with the idea that "So because 2+2=5, we can conclude that..." is not valid.  It does look tempting at first.  But reducing the madness, not building on it, should be the goal.