Learn and earn

Affirming a lower court decision, the Supreme Court Monday unanimously ruled that the NCAA, grand poobah of college sports, can’t ban a range of education-related payments to college athletes. It was the right decision, but it doesn’t change the rotten fundamentals that star athletes who rake in billions of dollars for their schools are prohibited from seeking any compensation.

There’s an easy way to start fixing that problem: Let players profit off the court from their likeness and other marketing, as college influencers and others already do, without paying them for playing. States as diverse as Alabama, California, Colorado and Connecticut have already passed such bills. All others should follow suit, as should the feds.

Those who advocate for the players who light up March Madness and the College Football Playoffs aren’t satisfied with that reform; they want players to get paychecks for their on-court labor. But the trouble with casting off the amateur label and declaring the term “student-athlete” a sham is that most players are in fact supposed to be getting an education, often in exchange for a scholarship — and that’s not the farce that many make it out to be. Nine out of 10 college athletes who started in 2013 earned degrees (even among the teams in the men’s NCAA tournament, graduation rates are often respectable), and the vast, vast majority of those go on not to the pros but to join the broader economy.

So, too, most college athletics are not big revenue generators. Would advocates pay footballers but not swimmers? Male athletes but not female ones? That would seem to violate the spirit if not the letter of Title IX, the landmark law seeking equivalent athletic opportunities for both sexes.

The answer in plain sight is to let sports stars profit by marketing their talents — much as a campus musician or model or computer programmer can. On the court or field, sports will stay amateur. Otherwise, what athletes do is literally their own business.