The U.S. Education Department is scrapping a policy from the Biden administration that threatened to upend colleges’ plans to pay athletes for their name, imagine and likeness by making those payments subject to federal Title IX rules.
President Donald Trump’s education officials announced the change Wednesday, saying the policy from former President Joe Biden’s final days in office had no legal basis under Title IX, the 1972 law forbidding sex discrimination in education.
“The NIL guidance, rammed through by the Biden Administration in its final days, is overly burdensome, profoundly unfair and it goes well beyond what agency guidance is intended to achieve,” said Craig Trainor, acting assistant secretary for civil rights.
A Jan. 16 memo from the Biden administration told universities that NIL payments must be treated the same as athletic financial aid such as scholarships.
Many universities have publicly said the majority of their NIL payments would go to football and men’s basketball players under the terms of a House settlement that’s expected to be approved this spring. That threatened to run afoul of the Biden policy, which said NIL payments “must be made proportionately available to male and female athletes.”
Trump’s education officials said such a sweeping change would require “clear legal authority” that does not exist.
“Enacted over 50 years ago, Title IX says nothing about how revenue-generating athletics programs should allocate compensation among student athletes,” Trainor said.
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