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.
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.
That threatened to run afoul of the Biden policy, which said NIL payments “must be made proportionately available to male and female athletes.”.
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.
