Why Caitlin Clark could make more money staying in college than going to the

She’s a senior, but has a fifth year of NCAA eligibility remaining due to an additional year granted to many athletes who lost time during their college careers due to the COVID pandemic. So Clark must decide if becoming a super-senior or declaring for the WNBA Draft will be better for her – and her finances.

“The answer has changed a ton in the last three years because the NCAA dropped its ban on NIL,” Victor Matheson, an economics professor at the College of the Holy Cross who specializes in sports, told MarketWatch. “Three years ago if she had decided to come back for another year she’d get a year of high-quality Iowa education and the love and adulation of every person in Iowa. But she wouldn’t be able to get any cash out of it. A move to the WNBA would have made sense.”

But times have changed.

The NCAA began allowing college athletes to earn money off their name, image and likeness in 2021 — when student-athletes won a decades-long argument over the fairness of receiving no remuneration for use of their NIL, even as the games they played in generated millions of dollars for the institutions in which they were enrolled.

Clark will make an estimated $910,000 from NIL deals this season, according to On3’s proprietary NIL algorithm, which is based on NIL-deal data, performance, influence and exposure. She has deals with brands including Gatorade, State Farm, Nike

NKE

,
Buick, Topps and H&R Block

HRB

.

If she turns pro and is one of the top few picks, she will earn $76,535 in salary, so she would likely earn a majority of her income from off-court business opportunities.

As MarketWatch wrote last fall, 10 college athletes made over $1 million last season from NIL deals. Two of them were women, including basketball player Angel Reese of LSU, who made $1.7 million.

For many of the top college male athletes who have college eligibility left, the question of whether to go pro is easier. That’s because the NBA, NFL and MLB pay top picks a lot more than the NIL money they earn. 

See also: Super Bowl quarterback Brock Purdy made $870,000 this season — 16 college football players made more via NIL

“I think she should stay,” Tim Derdenger, associate professor of marketing and strategy at Carnegie Mellon University’s Tepper School of Business, told MarketWatch. “The spotlight will be even bigger for her coming back and her NIL deals will be larger,…