The Supreme Court freed college athletes to earn. Collective bargaining is the next step.

William Gould

(Originally published by The Philadelphia Inquirer on July 8, 2026.)

It is past time for Division I colleges and universities to recognize that their student-athletes deserve both the right to bargain collectively and recognition that they are employees because of the compensation their institutions provide to them and the control those institutions have over them.

A deluge of media coverage has been aimed at other issues in big-time college sports, particularly football and basketball, but too little attention has been given to what should be center-stage — how student-athletes should be fairly treated by the institutions that benefit from their athletic prowess.

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