An op-ed by Earl Smith, PhD
Intercollegiate athletics was once sold to the public as an extension of higher education.
Today, it is far closer to a deregulated labor market fueled by money, mobility, and institutional indifference. Nowhere is this more visible than in big-time college football—and increasingly, in every NCAA sport—where the combination of Name, Image, and Likeness (NIL) payments and the transfer portal has transformed student-athletes into roaming commodities.
This did not happen overnight. I warned about the erosion of the “student” in student-athlete in 2007, 2009, and again in 2014.
The question then was whether universities were still educating the athletes whose bodies and labor generated billions. Today the question is even more basic: who on campus is responsible for these young people at all?
When an athlete transfers for the third, fourth, or even seventh time—now increasingly common—who tracks their academic trajectory? Who monitors whether they are progressing toward a degree, or just accumulating credits that will never add up to one? Is it admissions? The registrar? Academic advising? Athletic departments? Or has everyone quietly decided that as long as the athlete can still play, no one else is accountable?
For decades, scholars and the public relied on graduation and persistence data to measure whether colleges were delivering on their educational promises. Those reports have all but disappeared, replaced by glossy NCAA public relations numbers that obscure more than they reveal. Try today to find independent, transparent data on where student-athletes go, how long they stay, and whether they actually graduate. You won’t.
Instead, we get transfer headlines. A player is no longer introduced by their major, their academic honors, or even their years in school. They are introduced by their previous schools: transferred from here, then there, then somewhere else. Women’s sports are now following the same patterns as men. The NCAA has quietly normalized the idea that an “amateur” can spend seven or eight years cycling through institutions, chasing playing time, NIL money, or simply survival.
The defenders of this system say it empowers athletes. But early evidence suggests something else: it is entrenching inequality and chaos. The marriage of NIL and the transfer portal has created a financial arms race in which wealthy Power Five programs stockpile talent, while smaller schools become feeder systems. Bowl eligibility, conference competitiveness, and even institutional survival are increasingly dictated by who can afford to buy and retain players.
This is not free agency with guardrails. It is free agency without accountability.
Universities still collect tuition dollars, claim federal student aid, and market themselves as educational institutions. Yet for a growing class of athletes, especially in revenue sports, education has become incidental. The system absorbs their labor, monetizes their visibility, and then moves on—often leaving them with fragmented transcripts, no degree, and no institutional home.
If college sports are to retain even a shred of their educational legitimacy, universities must confront this reality. NIL and the transfer portal are not inherently evil. But without serious academic oversight, transparency, and enforceable responsibility for student outcomes, they have become tools for institutional exploitation.
We didn’t get “student-athlete empowerment.”
We got Mo M$$NEY —and less education than ever.