“I Didn’t Even Know This Was a Thing”: College Athletes’ Knowledge of and Attitudes Toward Potential Employee Status

College athletics is experiencing rapid changes, prompting myriad proposed reform models, with one of the most prominent being the potential reclassification of college athletes from students to employees. Through the lens of amateur and commercial logics, we surveyed Power Four college athletes on their knowledge of and attitudes toward potential employee status. Results revealed that athletes held limited knowledge of employment, often depending on informal resources outside of their athletic departments, highlighting uneven access to information within a system in which athletes are central stakeholders yet remain peripheral to decision-making processes. Still, athletes’ attitudes toward employment leaned more positive, despite expressing conflicting attitudes on what employment would mean for sport offerings and potential loss of scholarship, reflecting tensions between labor-based understandings of participation and longstanding institutional narratives of education and amateurism. Similarly, athletes were uncertain or negative toward unionization and striking, suggesting ambivalence toward collective labor action within a context where athlete rights have long been constrained. Findings extend sport labor scholarship by showing how perceptions of “employee” are situated within broader structures of power and institutional control, with implications for how sport leaders and stakeholders engage athlete voice and rights in this evolving landscape.