From ESPN:
In an emotional address on Monday at a meeting of the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics, Kylia Carter, mother of former Duke basketball star Wendell Carter, compared the current system of NCAA basketball to slavery and a prison system.
"When you remove all the bling and the bells and the sneakers and all that," she said, "you've paid for a child to come to your school to do what you wanted them to do for you, for free, and you made a lot of money when he did that, and you've got all these rules in place that say he cannot share in any of that. The only other time when labor does not get paid but yet someone else gets profits and the labor is black and the profit is white, is in slavery.
Colleges offer what they offer. Carter and his parents knew the deal coming in. If you don't like the deal, don't take it. If they genuinely regarded it as slavery, they could have opted out by negotiating a contract to play overseas. They didn't choose that option. Her anger is being directed at the NCAA but the problem is that the NBA won't offer contracts to 18 year olds and they're afraid to play overseas.
If you're the NCAA, try designing a system to pay players. Sure, Duke can afford to pay players but can ECU or Elon? There are far, far more ECUs and Elons in the world than Dukes. How do you have a competition where some schools can afford to pay players and others can't? If you do pay players, do Wendell Carter and Antonio Vrankovich get paid the same amount? I'm pretty sure that Mrs. Carter would believe that her son was still being ripped off if that were the case. What should we have -- open bidding for the services of HS seniors or, perhaps, a draft of HS players? The fact is that for the vast majority of college basketball players, a scholarship is a good deal. I don't see changing the whole system in order to accommodate a handful of players each year.