At a Monday meeting of the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics, Mark Emmert, president of the National Collegiate Athletic Association, announced that this week he will propose a plan to the Division I Board of Directors that would help close what is known as the “scholarship gap” for student-athletes. The scholarship gap has arisen from a systemic flaw in the financial aid awarded to student-athletes, which covers only “tuition and fees, room and board, and required course-related books,” according to the NCAA by-laws.

This definition of aid leaves out other important expenses such as transportation, food and clothing, which means that few recipients of so-called “full” scholarships actually are awarded enough money to cover their true cost of living. In fact, a report by the National College Players Association and the Ithaca College Graduate Program in Sport Management revealed that the average gap between aid and expenses in 2009 for Division I athletes receiving full scholarships was $2,951 annually.

Thus, it is promising that Emmert’s proposal would allow universities to provide as much as $2,000 in additional aid money to student-athletes attending college on full athletic scholarships. His knee-jerk characterization of the plan as “unequivocally not” a move toward a “pay-to-play” system wherein student-athletes would receive direct monetary compensation for their athletic contributions, however, suggests there is a long way to go before fair-market compensation is provided to those who form the backbone of what has become a multi-billion dollar industry.

This is a shame since it is hard to see what differentiates athletic performance from other services such as lifeguarding, technology support and instructional assistance that many students provide to universities in exchange for market wages. Student-athletes devote a tremendous amount of time and energy toward training for and participating in various competitions that often generate universities significant sums of money. Therefore, they should be permitted to compete for wages in the same way they are expected to compete on the field.

Although Emmert and others are concerned that a “pay-to-play” system would sully the purity of amateur college athletics, that ideal was lost long ago. It is now becoming common for student-athletes at major universities to accept under-the-table payments and in-kind services, as evidenced by recently unearthed scandals at Ohio State University and the University of Miami where players received free or discounted tattoos, jewelry and prostitutes. Instituting a system of direct payments run through universities themselves would make student-athlete compensation much more aboveboard and beneficial to the recipients.

Others have objected that universities cannot justify devoting even more money to their athletics programs at a time when many are struggling simply to fund their core academic functions. If this is the case, however, then it means universities should scale back their athletic ambitions and ask less of student-athletes whose seasons, travel itineraries and media exposure have been expanded in recent years. This would help to bring the expectations heaped upon student-athletes into line with the compensation they currently receive through their athletic scholarships.

Yet many universities appear to be moving in the opposite direction by involving themselves in complex conference realignments meant to create larger and more lucrative television markets. The result of this upheaval will be lengthier travels and intense media scrutiny that will demand even more from student-athletes. If universities cannot find the money to compensate their student-athletes for these inconveniences, then they must excuse themselves from the ballooning growth of college athletics. Rather, they should focus on reforms that would allow for shorter seasons, more time off and even curtailed television coverage in the interest of safeguarding the academic well-being of student-athletes.