WASHINGTON — A U.S. Senate panel on Tuesday added to the fierce debate over compensation for student-athletes, with senators and experts agreeing the current system wasn’t working but with different ideas for a path forward.

Sen. Bill Cassidy, a Louisiana Republican and chair of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, hosted a roundtable of experts, leaders and former college and professional athletes to discuss “fixing college sports.”

Cassidy said the “current system is actually hurting the student-athlete.”

“Our effort will be, what do we do to protect the student-athlete?” he continued, adding that approach would also protect universities.

Two of the five panelists Cassidy brought in hailed from Louisiana State University, including Collis Temple Jr., a member of the LSU Board of Supervisors and former basketball star at the university, along with Julie Cromer, executive deputy athletic director and chief operating officer for LSU Athletics. 

The event came on the heels of a White House roundtable last week, where President Donald Trump pledged to imminently deliver an executive order aimed at reshaping college sports. 

Debate over athletes as employees

The college sports world continues to grapple with the fallout from the NCAA’s 2021 guidelines, which allowed student-athletes to profit from their name, image and likeness. 

A federal judge in June 2025 approved the terms of a nearly $2.8 billion antitrust settlement that paved the way for schools to directly pay athletes.

The rules for name, image and likeness deals vary from state to state.

The college sports landscape is also wrestling with gender inequity in NIL deals and the NCAA’s controversial transfer portal, among other issues.

A bipartisan bill on pause in the U.S. House aims to create a national framework for college athletes’ compensation. It would also prohibit college athletes from being classified as employees while providing broad antitrust immunity to the NCAA and college sports conferences.

House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Louisiana Republican, expressed optimism over the bill’s fate during the White House roundtable, saying “we’re right on the verge of passage in the House and we now think we have the votes to do that.” 

But the bill would face a dismal path in the Senate, where Senate Democrats have pushed back against it.

Meanwhile, a bipartisan proposal from GOP Sen. Eric Schmitt of Missouri and Democratic Sen. Maria Cantwell of Washington state would provide “a new antitrust exemption allowing college football institutions to jointly sell media rights” and make it “optional for conferences and schools to pool their media rights together.”

Conversation between schools and athletes needed

Jim Carr, president and CEO of the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics, said “the implications of student-athletes becoming employees, or a lot of these court decisions that are making it difficult to enforce our rules around what we call education-based athletics, is really — I don’t think it’s an overstatement or being too dramatic to say — critical to not only the NAIA but each of our institutions being able to stay in business on a long-term basis.” 

Carr, whose association includes roughly 250 institutions, said at an average NAIA school, 36% of the students are also athletes.

Sen. Chris Murphy called for collective bargaining, where athletes can “speak for themselves,” noting that Congress should not “micromanage” the relationship between colleges and college athletes. 

“We should just empower the colleges or the conferences and the athletes to have a conversation between themselves,” the Connecticut Democrat said. 

Bernard Dennis III, principal at Jackson Lewis P.C. and an employment and sports law expert, said that if students are classified as employees, “they then become subject to several statutory schemes, not the least of which would be the (Fair Labor Standards Act), which would allow them to be compensated for their work time, for overtime and then it becomes a challenge in what constitutes that.”

He added that “under the law, it would be anything that is required for their work, and so when you have eligibility rules about maintaining a certain GPA, things like that, it becomes not only your time on the field, but does going to class become compensable work time? How do you track that?”