I look at scholarships like a server working at a restaurant whose only compensation is a meal after their shift.

Must be a pretty expensive restaurant. It took me years to pay back my student loans and that was after getting some scholarship money. I also worked during my years in Athens. It is a lot more expensive now, so I wouldn't pooh pooh scholarship money, expecially when one realizes only a fraction of MAC athletes will ever make a professional team.

Clever but not really connected with any type of reality.

Have you ever looked at the statistics that show how much more the average college graduate makes in his or her lifetime vs what a person without a college degree makes?

Establishing that scholarships have value and establishing their actual value isn't relevant because it misses the point entirely.

There's no viewpoint here that scholarships don't have value. There are two viewpoints: 1) The belief that a scholarship is the only compensation college athletes should be allowed to receive, and 2) the view that they should be eligible to earn compensation beyond that as the market dictates.

The Supreme Court clearly believes that limiting compensation to only that provided by scholarships is akin to wage fixing and illegal. So saying "college scholarships are valuable" misses the point entirely. Of course they are.

The more pointed question is what is it about college scholarships that somehow makes it such that they can't exist alongside of other forms of compensation. Because that's the argument the NCAA has insisted on.

Of course scholarships are valuable, as is eating. My point is that from a cost standpoint, it doesn't take much money to absorb 15 basketball players or 80 football players into the university. So, if you take the 25,688 it cost to attend, it's much less than that as compensation.