What is the NIL policy?
NIL stands for Name, Image and Likeness. The National Collegiate Athletic Association's (NCAA) current policy regarding the NIL prevents college student athletes from making money off their own NIL and instead gives the NCAA full ownership of the athletes’ NILs. This means that colleges are able to profit off of their students by selling their likeness, image or name and having them used in advertisements or different products.

What problems do student athletes in college face?
As college student athletes have no external sources of revenue without ownership over their NILs, they become incredibly dependent on the scholarships that colleges offer them. This results in potential exploitation by these schools as they have significant power over their student athletes by threatening to cancel their scholarships and forcing them to drop college and leave its sports team.

Some examples of abuse include overworking athletes despite severe strains to their physical conditions, preventing them from focusing on their academic progress as it conflicts with athletic training, or even being treated aggressively by college coaches. Even Richard Sherman, an American football cornerback, describes how as a college student athlete, he was unable to properly concentrate on his academics due to a grueling schedule of doing weights and practicing every day.

This is why the common response to these concerns of "athletes are paid through scholarships" is insufficient as it fails to acknowledge the inability of countless student athletes to prioritize their academics.

Why aren’t student athletes given ownership of their NIL?
Colleges and other supporters of the NCAA's NIL policy argue that almost every single student athlete is a loss for the university as colleges need to make large investments into each student athlete and frequently receive far smaller gains from the majority of college athletes. To be even more precise, according to the Atlantic, the college football program alone spends over $200,000 on every single athlete.

This significant investment can only be made by the colleges because they own the name, image and likeness of student athletes and are capable of making large sums of money off the best student athletes and top level games, which go to fund a majority, if not all, of the sports programs for many schools.

For example, this looks like the revenue from March Madness, the annual NCAA college basketball tournament, supporting the entire funding of other sports programs, such as lacrosse or baseball. Without this kind of revenue through the college's ownership of the NIL, sports programs like Division 3 basketball teams would either be underfunded or cut altogether.