By Christian Collins

Last month, the push for college athletes to collectively bargain gained significant momentum with the news that football players at Stanford University, the Oregon State University women’s basketball team, and over 100 women’s college basketball players have publicly expressed their desire to bargain as employees and taken key steps toward unionizing. Unionization would allow players a direct say in key terms of their athletic participation, from health and safety to transfers, eligibility, and compensation.

These developments come at a time when Congress is actively considering legislation to dramatically reshape college sports. Last year, a bill that would prevent college athletes from being recognized as employees and enshrine antitrust protections for the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) into law—the Student Compensation and Opportunity through Rights and Endorsements (SCORE) Act—was introduced in the House and gained 21 cosponsors. This summer, the Protect College Sports Act (PCSA) passed the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation on a 19-9 vote. The PCSA cleared a major hurdle this week after winning a Senate cloture vote 74-24, despite the bill text not being finalized or released to the public at the time of the vote and with several legal questions on bill provisions that have yet to be addressed.

College Athletes Meet the Legal Standard to be Labeled Employees

Two pathways—collective bargaining and federal legislation—represent the possible avenues by which current tensions in college sports may be resolved. Collective bargaining would guarantee protection under federal law through allowing college athletes to jointly negotiate with colleges and the NCAA over the terms and conditions of their athletic participation. To avoid going to the bargaining table with athletes, colleges and the NCAA have sought intervention from Congress to instead be protected from federal law for past and present exploitation. PCSA, like its predecessor SCORE, seeks to place the blame of financial gaps squarely on the shoulders of athletes and solidify the longstanding advantages that have enabled colleges to profit handsomely off the talent and hard work of those athletes—without having to compensate them fairly or grant them the rights and protections that employees are entitled to.

The system that has persisted for decades in which athletes generate billions of dollars in revenue for colleges, the NCAA, and media companies, yet see a small share returned to them in the form of scholarships is now threatening to collapse. In recent years, courts have increasingly recognized athletics participation as work and athletes as employees. In NCAA v. Alston in 2021, the Supreme Court rejected the claim that “amateurism” is a valid defense against the NCAA complying with laws that ensure fair market competition. Following the decision, the NCAA eliminated its rules restricting athletes from receiving compensation from endorsements, ushering in the new era of “name, image, and likeness” (NIL) deals. Relatedly, the House v. NCAA settlement in 2025 awarded current and former Division I athletes $2.8 billion in damages due to denying them NIL compensation and established fairer compensation for future athletes at schools that agreed to the settlement through direct revenue sharing of $20.5 million per year, rising 4 percent annually.

Similarly, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) under Biden in 2024 determined that a group of Dartmouth college basketball players met the common-law definition of employee, which “requires that the employer have the right to control the employee’s work, and that that work be performed in exchange for compensation,” pointing to the non-monetary benefits that athletes receive—even in the absence of scholarships, per Ivy League rules. While the players voted to unionize following this decision, they withdrew their petition to be recognized after the 2024 election in anticipation of an incoming NLRB that would be more likely to reject their petition.

Congress Can’t “Protect College Sports” by Ignoring the Participants

While the PCSA is neutral on its face concerning the question of athletes’ employment status, it would enshrine into law a range of terms and conditions of athletic participation, eliminating athletes’ opportunities to bargain over these terms and in many cases setting terms that are favorable to schools, conferences, and the NCAA. As the American Economic Liberties Project wrote in its memo opposing the legislation, the bill “puts Congress in the shoes of the players and makes choices and tradeoffs they wouldn’t necessarily make in a true collective bargaining process, where health, safety, wellness, and economic terms would all be on the table.” These terms impact not just players’ experience in sports, but also in academics and their personal lives. Transfer rules, for example, seek to prevent frequently changing rosters and athletes easily seeking better contracts elsewhere. In doing so, it also limits athletes’ choice about which schools and teams are best for them as students to, for example, pursue a new major or be closer to family. In addition, it allows schools to use the transfer portal as a weapon to wield against students by kicking them into the portal as punishment, like if they’re suspected of organizing other athletes. Rather than allowing athletes a voice in the process, the PCSA locks into law the major terms of their participation, preventing athletes from winning better terms in the future and extending anticompetitive immunity to the NCAA that few industries enjoy.

Most concerningly, college sports legislation has been crafted with little to no input from the college athletes themselves. As one current University of Utah football player observed during a Senate committee hearing on the PCSA, “It’s like there’s no student-athlete in those conversations at all.” In recent weeks, current and former college athletes across the country have come out against the bill. A letter with signatories from a range of schools argues that the PCSA would make it “substantially more difficult for student-athletes to receive legitimate compensation,” while athletes from the United College Athletes Association have said they favor collective bargaining as a way to settle key questions in college sports. One former college athlete argued in an op-ed that “players, coaches, schools and communities that made these sports great in the first place” should be the ones to make decisions about the future of college sports—not Washington. As the joint letter states, the fact that “the issue of conference alignment and media rights pooling have been among the most contentious, and also seems to involve student-athletes the least” is very telling: right now, Congress and the NCAA are negotiating over the distribution of the $19 billion in annual revenues the college athletes generate through hours of practices, competitions, travel, and hard work without allowing them a seat at the table. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the AFL-CIO Sports Council, a collaboration between labor unions that represent professional athletes, similarly reject the PCSA.

Congress should step aside from attempting to govern the minutiae of college athletes’ daily lives and lock in further advantages for powerful entities such as the NCAA. Schools don’t need to wait on Congress to act; if they chose to, they could negotiate with athletes to build a fair and equitable college athletics system tomorrow by voluntarily recognizing athletes as employees. The athletes whose hard work and dedication are the raw material for the enterprise beloved by millions of Americans should be fairly represented in the process as the workers they are.

Other CLASP publications on the exploitation of college athletes and related public policies include:

• Congress Is Weaponizing Federal Law Against College Athletes By Cutting Pell Grant Access and Stripping Labor Protections
• The SCORE Act Would Harm College Athletes by Codifying Inequity into Federal Law
• Equal Play, Unequal Pay: Race-Conscious Admissions and the Systemic Exploitation of Black Male Athletes
• The Exploitation of Black Athletes
• SCOTUS Ruling Disproportionately Impacts Opportunities for Black Male