College athletes commit time, exert effort, and risk injury for their sport. When they do so on teams that draw large crowds and television audiences, their participation also generates substantial revenue. For instance, a 2020 article in Sports Business Journal reported that the 65 university sports programs of the Power Five conferences (the Atlantic Coast Conference, the Big Ten Conference, the Big 12 Conference, the Pac-12 Conference, and the Southeastern Conference) generated $8.3 billion in revenue in the previous academic year (Broughton, 2020). Yet very little of that money goes to the athletes whose play on the field or court generates it. Although the NCAA has recently changed its policies to permit individual athletes to negotiate agreements so that they may be paid for the promotional use of their name, image, and likeness by parties other than their university, college athletes are still not permitted to receive payments from universities as compensation for their athletic participation.
This prospect of universities paying college athletes for their participation is controversial. Notably, opinions on this topic often differ according to the race of the person holding the opinion, with Black respondents expressing more support than White respondents do for “pay for play.” For example, the UMass Lowell Center for Public Opinion (2017) found that 54% of Black respondents endorsed revenue-based compensation for college athletes, whereas only 31% of White respondents did. In a recently published articleopens in new window in Cultural Diversity & Ethnic Minority Psychology, Michael Sargent explored such differences by examining how racial ingroup identification can contribute to them.
In three online surveys, Black and White respondents read about an actual proposal, advanced by two U.S. senators, under which college athletes would receive “fair and equitable compensation,” such as a share of the revenue their play generates (Philippou, 2020). Each respondent then indicated their level of support for such compensation. Respondents also completed a measure of how strongly they identified with their racial ingroup. The scale—adapted from one developed by Colin W. Leach et al. (2008)—is designed to measure two dimensions of ingroup identification. The dimension of interest in this work was self-investment, the extent to which a person feels solidarity with other ingroup members, takes satisfaction in their group membership, and reports the group membership as being central to their sense of self.
Consistent with the results of previous work, Black respondents expressed greater support for college athlete compensation than did White respondents, but this was more true for respondents with a high degree of self-investment in their racial ingroup than for those low in self-investment. Additionally, as self-investment increased among Black respondents, so did their support. By contrast, increases in self-investment among White respondents predicted less support for college athlete compensation.
One potential explanation for this pattern of results is that the college sports programs most likely to be net producers of revenue—Power Five basketball and football teams—have a disproportionately large number of Black athletes. Thus, policies that compensate athletes in proportion to the revenue their play generates will disproportionately benefit Black athletes. It stands to reason, then, that among Black respondents, the ones most invested in their racial ingroup would be the ones most supportive of a policy likely to benefit ingroup members. As for White respondents, other work suggests that White identity strength predicts zero-sum thinking, whereby benefits to racial outgroups are believed to necessarily entail costs to the White ingroup (Jardina, 2019). Therefore, it makes sense that the most self-invested White respondents were most skeptical of a compensation policy that would disproportionately benefit Black athletes.
Because Black workers’ compensation tends to lag behind that of White workers more broadly in the U.S. economy (Wilson, 2016), it is conceivable that such relationships as these will not be limited to attitudes toward paying athletes. It may be that, for any policy change that could be especially beneficial for Black workers, opinions will not only diverge between Black and White observers, but will be especially divergent among those most strongly invested in their respective racial ingroup. Such results would demonstrate the broader relevance of collective identity to policy opinion.
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