Dear John: This won’t be a nasty note, but rather will propose a compromise to the debate over student athletes being paid.

I disagree with your overall stand. My compromise is this: Pay them. Your part in the compromise? Since they’re now being paid, they can pay their own tuition, room and board. They can’t have it both ways. Either they take the current situation — worth upward of $250,000 — or they go for the pay. Sounds more than reasonable to me.

But I already paid for non-athletes to go to school, so my point of view may be skewed. This approach may actually help them get an education, as they’ll have some skin in the game. My daughter is in fundraising at an elite college. Throughout colleges, athletes who have received scholarships do not contribute after graduation at a rate even close to those who had to pay. Make of it what you will, but my take is that something gained at a lesser price is appreciated less. ‘V.M. 

Dear V.M.: So a high-school athlete gets to choose Door No. 1, which is a full scholarship, room and board. Or Door No. 2, which gives him or her some level of pay for their efforts, but he or she has to foot his or her own education bills. But the pay would obviously have to exceed the — let’s use your number — $250,000 that an education allegedly costs over four years. If not, the student athlete really doesn’t have any choice.

The problem is this: The school’s real cost isn’t $250,000. Syracuse University only has to put another chair in a classroom to accommodate the student athlete. They aren’t paying professors for the number of kids they teach. Room and board is a somewhat fixed cost. But the cafeteria doesn’t make just enough food for the students who may come to eat. So even there you could argue that a student athlete is only eating what would be left over and thrown out. So there’s no real cost to the school here either. So no university would be willing to pay a student athlete $250,000 to attend.

They couldn’t afford to, especially for the third-string linebacker or the kid on the basketball team sitting the bench. Therefore, I politely reject your compromise. As for fundraising: That’s a whole different story. Maybe student athletes think their contribution to the school was the years they played for free while their alma mater was cashing the checks. But there’s something we can take away from your letter and it’s this: Somewhere out there is a solution that’ll keep college-sports crazy people like me happy and be fair to athletes. Keep looking and we’ll find it. Thanks for the letter.

Dear John: I look forward to reading your column each Sunday because you often cut through the fog of irrationality. Recently, however, I think you have been enveloped, temporarily I hope, by that fog. Raise gas taxes? And do so while gas prices are down so that we really won’t notice? That would be an incentive for the government to keep gas prices down? 

If we can admit that government is not at all responsible with our money, it seems silly to advocate giving it more, rather than limiting what it gets and encouraging it to be more responsible. Raising taxes while prices are down so we “wouldn’t even miss [the money]” is disingenuous and would be expected from a big-spending politician, not a logical, responsible advocate of honesty. Finally, the anti-fossil fuel crowd is in power, trying to scare us with stories of climate change and pushing renewable energy that is not, as of yet, particularly efficient. They do not want gas prices to remain down, and they don’t give a damn about the costs of gasoline. R.S.

Dear R.S.: Maybe I was sniffing gasoline fumes when I wrote that.

Or maybe my brain was rattled because I had just hit one of the millions of enormous potholes on our roads and thought maybe — just maybe — someone should have enough money to fill one or two of them. OK, the hell with the potholes. And don’t worry about the vets, they can take care of themselves. (I also proposed using extra gas tax revenue for that.) Let’s live in an every-man-for-himself society. And may the best man (Dar-)win.

Send your questions to Dear John, The New York Post, 1211 Ave. of the Americas, NY, NY 10036, or john.crudele@nypost.com.