What could be the most valuable asset to college athletes in the new age of NIL? Their time.
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What Could Be The Most Valuable Asset To College Athletes In The New Age of NIL? Their Time.
Executive Summary
Division I student-athletes’ daily planners stay full with classes, tutor appointments, practices, training, competition, team travel, sleep, socializing, and relaxing -- now NIL and more entrepreneurial activities are added to the mix
NCAA Division I’s NIL proposals and state and congressional NIL bills have not benchmarked any ceiling on the amount of time college athletes could spend on NIL activities in any given week
A 2010 study showed that college students in 1961 averaged 40 hours per week toward class and study; by 2003 it dropped to 27 hours per week
The NCAA GOALS study published in 2017 confirmed current student-athletes surveyed in 2005-06 had significant time demands driven primarily by academic and athletic commitments (along with sleep) and these activities far outpaced relaxing and socializing
A 2019 study found that college students have been studying more per week since 2004
A 2018 study concluded at least 71% of college athletes spent an hour per day on social media with 32% of those surveyed stating they spent two or more hours
NCAA Division I eligibility rules require student-athletes to carry a full-time course load of at least 12 credit hours each regular academic term, with exceptions
NCAA daily and weekly in-season and offseason countable hours have significant impact on student-athletes’ daily schedule
Division I implemented time management rules to help protect student-athletes’ off days and support advance notice of their athletic schedules
Division I rules and campus level policies likely won’t regulate a time limit on student-athletes’ NIL activity but may restrict the activities when conflicting with other required activities
“Ticking away the moments that make up a dull day...You fritter and waste the hours in an offhand way.” are the telling opening lines to Pink Floyd’s anthem “Time,” reminding us of the fragility of our finite window of existence on Earth.
Based on a multitude of studies as well as anecdotal examples, college athletes don’t have time to fritter their hours away while in college.
With athletic, academic and social commitments as well as sleep needs already consuming the bulk of Division I student-athletes’ schedules any given day, the advent of name-image-likeness (NIL) activities could add a significant log to the fire that continues to melt college athletes’ time. A case could be made that student-athletes want to reallocate some of their currently budgeted hours dedicated to academics, athletics, socializing or sleep to invest in their NIL lives.
AV brings to light this week a cross-section of survey data, current and proposed policies by the NCAA, and stakeholder perspectives to illustrate how college athletes living in an NIL world may remind us of Benjamin Franklin’s famous maxim that “time is money.”
On the academic side, college students (not just college athletes) have devoted varying hours of time per week to their studies dating back to the 1960s. According to a 2010 study entitled “The Falling Time Cost of College: Evidence from a Half Century of Time Use Data” by economists Philip Babcock and Mindy Marks, full-time college students allocated 40 hours per week toward class and studying in 1961; whereas, by 2003, they were investing about 27 hours per week. Per the authors, declines were extremely broad-based and not easily accounted for by framing effects, work or major choices, or compositional changes in students or schools. The authors concluded there have been substantial changes over time in the quantity or manner of human capital production on college campuses. Interestingly, the authors summarized their findings in the more sensationally titled “Leisure College, USA: The Decline in Student Study Time” published by the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) (Babcock and Marks 2010).
NCAA eligibility rules certainly have a direct effect on the amount of time student-athletes are spending on their studies. Division I competition eligibility rules require student-athletes to be enrolled full-time in at least 12 credit hours each regular academic term with a few exceptions, such as their final semester before graduation when a student-athlete might only need three or six credits to complete their degree requirements. Backstopping the actual courses student-athletes are enrolled in are study halls and academic advising appointments that also take time.
NCAA Division I playing and practice season rules hold that for the championship season, student-athletes may not participate in more than four hours of countable athletically related activities (CARA) in a day (with exceptions) and no more than 20 hours of CARA in a week (with exceptions), with at least one day off mandated per week. For weeks that fall outside the sport’s championship season but during the academic year, student-athletes are limited to eight hours of CARA per week and no more than two hours of CARA in a day with two days off mandated per week.
In addition, student-athletes in men’s basketball, women’s basketball, and football have eight weeks of “summer access” activity during the summer months which can include up to eight hours per week of CARA. Summer access activity usually requires summer school enrollment although recent summers have included NCAA waivers exempting the requirement. Further, fall and spring sports’ championship seasons that, respectively, begin before the fall term or finish after the spring term also place athletic activities into the daily schedules of college athletes outside their institutions’ regular academic calendar.
Well before the headline-grabbing NIL renaissance we are living today, time and time management for NCAA Division I student-athletes was a real concern that became a top policy matter for the Division I membership. In January 2017, Division I adopted rules that required an institution to develop a student-athlete time management plan for each varsity intercollegiate sport in which the NCAA sponsored a championship or an emerging sport for women and, further, required the institution to conduct an annual end-of-year review of each sport's student-athlete time management plan and that the findings of each review must be sent to the institution's president or chancellor.
The time management policies sought to provide student-athletes with greater predictability and transparency relative to their athletic schedules. Requiring institutions to establish policies to ensure student-athletes are provided proper notice of future athletically related activities was intended to allow student-athletes the opportunity to effectively plan for upcoming academically related responsibilities and any social activities of interest. In addition, timely notice of subsequent schedule changes was intended to reduce uncertainty and prevent last minute scheduling practices that many student-athletes had identified as a concern. The NCAA time management rules have required a concerted and comprehensive annual review to ensure that individual programs have substantially complied with their own established policies throughout the year and that any student-athlete concerns regarding time management are properly heard and addressed.
As Inside Higher Ed reported in 2016, concerns about student-athletes’ time demands attributed to their college sport have been linked to everything from college athletes’ potential status as university employees to recent academic fraud cases that some believe are induced by the time student-athletes devote to their sports rather than their academics. A Penn Schoen Berland study cited in the article found that student-athletes in the Pac-12 conference were spending on average 50 hours a week on athletics during the season. Of the 409 athletes interviewed, 71% said that sleeping is the main thing that athletic commitments prevent them from doing.
An NCAA GOALS (Growth, Opportunities, Aspirations and Learning of Students) study published in 2017 asked student-athletes from 2005-06 to provide an accounting of a typical in-season weekday and weekend day. They self-reported hours spent in academics and athletics, as well as other extracurricular activities plus socializing, working and sleeping. By far, the most time is devoted to academics and athletics. In Division I, the academics/athletics breakdown was 37.3 hours per week and 35.4 hours per week, respectively. The averages are 35.9 and 33.5 in Division II, and 39.1 and 30.3 in Division III. That’s more than twice the time student-athletes spent on everything else (other than sleeping), including working at a job, socializing with friends and family, time spent relaxing, and time spent on other extracurricular activities.
Across divisions, student-athletes consistently reported focusing their time on three activities in particular during the off-season: studying, relaxing/socializing/time with family, and sleeping. Per the study, time demands differ greatly by sport and division. In general, student-athletes in Division I reported a greater in-season athletics time commitment than student-athletes in Divisions II and III. For example, football players in the Division I Football Bowl Subdivision spent more time on athletics than any other group (44.8 mean weekly hours), followed by men’s golf (40.8 mean weekly hours).
The GOALS survey also determined that in-season activities were not the only busy time of year for college athletes. Both Division I and II student-athletes reported spending as much or more time on their sport, including both physical activities (training, for example) and non-physical activities (such as team meetings), in the offseason as compared to in-season. [NOTE: The “offseason” could include the weeks during the academic year that are outside the championship season, but still may include limited CARA hours.] Just under half of Division III student-athletes (49%) reported spending as much or more time on physical activities, and just over half (54%) reported spending as much or more time on non-physical activities.
According to the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) report published in 2019, students now spend more time studying than they did a decade ago, although the study indicates the trend is starting to stall. In 2004, 34% of freshmen students spent about 15 hours per week studying. In 2017, this figure had increased to 45%, while in 2019, this percentage fell to 43%. On average, students currently spend about two more hours per week preparing themselves and studying than fifteen years ago. The researchers also found that seniors increased their time spent studying over this time frame.
The study did not specify whether the increase in study hours is due to higher expectations or new programs and methodologies such as collaborative learning, flipped classroom, competency-based education, and real-world problems or applications. Still, it is an encouraging discovery for educational institutions, per the NSSE, as its previous report outlined, the time spent studying correlates to institutional retention and graduation rates.
As we assess the NIL horizon, how much time college student-athletes spend on social media per day is a 21st century becomes a more notable variable. According to a 2018 survey of over 2,100 college athletes conducted by Fieldhouse Media, 71% of the college athletes surveyed said they spent at least one hour per day on social media while 32% reported spending more than two hours.
According to a review42.com article, 16 to 24-year-olds spent in 2020 a median of three hours a day on social media. At a macro level, the world’s population spent an average of two hours and 24 minutes on social media each day, according to a report from broadbandsearch.com.
The concerns around swelling time demands and correlating stresses that college athletes continue to face have been highlighted in recent years by watchdog groups monitoring the college athletics space. The Knight Commission, for example, articulated in its 2016 White Paper the following perspective on time demands being an issue needing attention but not a justification to neutralize a student-athlete’s financial opportunity in pursuing NIL activities:
“Fears regarding time demands and creation of a ‘social wedge’ that interferes with education may also be reasonable, but they cannot be used to justify the blanket restriction on non-game NIL payments. The NCAA recognizes that student-athletes already face extreme time demands in their sports and that athletics have not been perfectly integrated into academics. These time demands, television exposure, and celebrity status, among other things, already contribute to a wedge between the student and the student-athlete. The NCAA needs to address all of the time-demands and potential educational distractions faced by student-athletes (including reducing length of seasons, practice time, etc.), not simply the ones that offer the student-athletes a financial benefit.”
The tabled NCAA NIL proposals along with the flurry of state bills either proposed or enacted and the congressional NIL bills being introduced do not, as a group, indicate any intent to regulate the amount of time college athletes could spend on pursuing NIL activities -- whether those activities be social media influencing, in-store appearances, commercial shoots, or running their own businesses, including camps and clinics.
In lieu of a prescribed hourly limit per week on NIL activities, the amount of time available to student-athletes to spend on their NIL activities may ultimately be inversely regulated by campus, athletic department, and team-level policies that establish other activities student-athletes cannot miss -- such as class, study hall, or required team activities (e.g., practice, competition, team travel).
The moorings between academic and non-academic pursuits continue to drift apart as we approach the runway toward an NIL liftoff. As the Knight Commission noted, the various elements that make student-athletes’ college experience more distinct from the general student population is a “wedge” some believe continues to grow wider.
Time, coincidentally, will tell how consuming NIL activities become in a student-athletes’ day and how those activities may affect everything from a student-athlete’s education, health, and athletic experience to a Division I institution’s graduation rates, a Division I team’s competitive success, and an evolving acknowledgement, if not acceptance, of reshuffled priorities for student-athletes in terms of how they might spend their time while in college.
Athletics Veritas is presented for information purposes only and should not be considered advice or counsel on NCAA compliance matters. For guidance on NCAA rules and processes, always consult your university’s athletics compliance office, conference office, and/or the NCAA.
