The United States is home to an incredibly unique institution for student-athletes. The National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) has long championed the integration of academics and athletics by recognizing athletics as a pillar of higher education. Simultaneously, the NCAA has served as a premier development center for future Olympic and professional athletes around the world. The success of the NCAA has reached across the globe, drawing international athletes who seek the opportunity to pursue a rigorous education while balancing their passion for sports. However, recent legal developments surrounding direct revenue sharing threaten to undermine the accessibility, equity, and educational focus that once defined the NCAA and college sports.
The introduction of a $2.8 billion antitrust lawsuit is poised to fundamentally restructure the NCAA’s balance between academics and athletics. In the 2020 lawsuit House v. NCAA, a group of former NCAA student-athletes challenged the Power Five athletic conferences and the NCAA’s restrictions on student-athletes’ ability to generate revenue from their name, image, and likeness. Historically, regulations prevented student-athletes from using their own NIL in brand deals at the risk of forfeiting eligibility, even as colleges and the NCAA profited from those same rights
This case was consolidated into In re College Athlete NIL Litigation, often referred to as the House settlement, which alleged that NCAA rules prohibiting NIL compensation violate the Sherman Antitrust Act. Conferences outside the Power Five were given the choice to join the settlement. Notably, the Ivy League did not opt into the settlement.
In the course of litigation, the NCAA introduced an interim policy in 2021 allowing college athletes to profit from their NIL. In June 2025, the NCAA approved a settlement that took the 2021 NIL policy a step further by enabling direct payments between institutions and student athletes, including fiscal backpay for past NIL opportunities. The NCAA and the Power Five will now pay out $2.8 billion as compensation for the use of athletes’ NIL. The payout is divided among Division I athletes who played between 2016 and 2024 and filed a claim.
Beyond the retrospective payout by the NCAA, the prospective era of revenue sharing is altering future budgetary distribution. The settlement provides colleges with the option to distribute athletic revenue directly to athletes, capped at 22% of the average shared revenue generated by the Power Five, which amounts to $20.5 million for the 2025-26 academic year. This figure is expected to increase throughout the settlement’s term, and athletes’ individual NIL deals do not contribute to this cap.
While the settlement allows athletes to profit directly from their work, it poses a high cost on many non-revenue-generating NCAA programs. The distribution of the revenue amongst athletes is entirely dependent on their school’s wishes, leading many to predict that revenue sharing will mainly target major revenue-generating athletic programs such as football and men’s basketball. This may endanger non-revenue sports programs, including a large percentage of women’s sports programs. Multiple lawsuits have challenged the settlement based on Title IX, but U.S. District Court Judge Claudia Wilken rejected the initial objections. Following this, in August 2025, President Trump filed an executive order titled “Saving College Sports” aimed at mitigating the effects of the House settlement, but it has yet to produce substantive changes. More recently, President Trump hosted a roundtable on March 6th, 2026, where he stated that he would write an executive order within the week to “solve all problems.” The effectiveness of this initiative will remain to be seen.
The settlement ends the NCAA’s ability to limit full scholarship opportunities, but in turn introduces roster limits on DI NCAA teams that opt in. Although institutions may now provide all athletes with scholarships within the sport-specific roster limit, this forces many programs to enact roster cuts. Limiting opportunities for diverse athletic development within colleges restricts the developmental pipeline of future professional and Olympic athletes who are otherwise unable to participate in athletics beyond high school. Walk-on athletes such as U.S. Olympic track runner Emily Mackay and NFL player Baker Mayfield might never have had the opportunity to develop into athletes capable of competing in the highest levels of their fields under such restrictions. Roster caps reduce opportunities available for partial scholarship athletes and walk-ons, thereby limiting the number of athletes given the chance to grow and develop within the NCAA as a pillar of education.
The consequences of this settlement will limit the scope of who has the opportunity to be an athlete, altering its historical reach. With the NCAA evolving into a semi-professional league in its own right, what is the value of education through athletics, and what do we risk losing through the shift in the NCAA’s ideology?
Beyond a potential future in professional athletics, sports serve as a way for students to build valuable teamwork skills and learn discipline, leadership, and time management. It can be hard to quantify all that students gain from athletic participation at any level, as the skills often associated with it can’t be measured on a traditional 4.0 GPA scale. However, studies measuring the success rates of college student-athletes in the workforce compared to their non-athlete peers display that something is setting student-athletes apart.
Yet, as student-athletes gain the ability to generate revenue directly from their institution, are these athletes still traditional students, or have they become employees of the institution? Under the current settlement, athletes are not classified as employees under federal tax or labor law; however, the revenue-sharing system leaves these lines increasingly blurred. The NCAA’s ideology of education through athletics is undermined if athletes become stunted in their academic development due to financial commitments and if escalating barriers to entry continue to limit athletic opportunities.
The revenue-sharing era of the NCAA poses a threat to the educational enterprise on which the NCAA was founded. The newfound restrictions beg the question: who gets to be an athlete, and who gets to make that choice? Additionally, the House settlement risks dispelling the “student” aspect of student-athlete and the amateur status that all NCAA athletes once held. As the first academic year since the settlement remains underway, the long-term consequences to opportunity and amateurism in the NCAA remain to be seen. When weighing the success of the settlement throughout the ten-year timeline of direct compensation, its success must be measured on a scale that is not solely weighted in revenue.
By establishing roster caps and minimizing the variety of athletic endeavors supported, the NCAA risks losing its role within educational institutions focused on academic and athletic professional development. When access becomes limited to a distinct sector of the population, the promise of education through athletics is confined to its ivory tower. Through the House settlement, the NCAA forgoes its ability to reach a wide range of participants and provide them with educational opportunities through athletics — dismantling the original ideology that defined what it means to be a student-athlete.
