Always good to hear from you North Cole......
First, please don't think for a second that I think other professional athletes are "highly educated", because that would be a pretty damned hot take!!
The point of this thread wasn't to claim that hockey players are dumb.....far from it. It was more an indictment of the NHL as a whole. The norm is that players don't go on to higher education and instead straight to the professional leagues.
Yes, we can say that the education they are getting is a joke, and for the most part, it probably is, but why is it that the NHL is the only North American professional sport that doesn't push the kids to go to school.
The only thing I can think of is that schools can't make money off the students as they do with other sports, so they don't really give a flying f*** about them.
Personally, I think its best that they don't go onto higher education, and I wouldn't indict the NHL for this alone. Those NCAA kids are used as cash cows for the Colleges to make millions, sure in some cases the player becomes elite and makes millions himself, in others they get a degree and advanced work placement since Alumni will get them nice easy jobs (meanwhile the school has made millions).
The NHL thing is a a national issue, more than corporate decision making issue. The big four leagues in the US grew up
from the college level as their grass roots. Taking NFL football for example, you can't have highschoolers being eligible for the NFL, or they would literally be killed playing a full contact headhunting sport against grown men (most of whom are freaks of nature). There is a very big difference between NHL and NFL physique, the NFL is full of absolute peak humans. This is also true for the CFL, as most players either wash out of the NFL and come here (Ricky Ray, et al) or they come up through a school program like Golden Bears, or Regina.
In the US, the bowl games have been around in most cases longer than the NFL itself, with some colleges going back 100+ years. For a long time, that was pretty well the highest level to play at - the Notre Dames, or Army vs Navy, etc. The NFL was very much an extension of those programs, and since the infrastructure and capitalism was already well established in the Colleges, they just continued to roll with it, also helped by the fact that you really just need these kids to spend four years maturing before sending them into the pros. I couldn't imagine the damage someone like Burfict would cause against 19 year old kids.
We are at the point where no one can really challenge the corporate engine that is the NCAA, it's just so many billions of dollars and driven by the madness of alumni who care more about their Alma Mater than pretty well anything else (in extreme cases its a very minor step below the flag). The NBA has talked for years about dropping the age restriction by one year, and recruiting ultra elite talent right out of highschool, which would effectively end the one and done prospects. It doesn't seem like they want to actually go through with it, too much NCAA lobbying - imagine how much money Duke pulled in just from having Zion on the team for one year.
Conversely, Canada does not have a populace that is so highly invested in college sports, so the U of A isn't going out to spend Nick Saban levels of money of hockey coaches (8.9M). These college coaches make what NHL coaches make x5 or x10... The best ways of being drafted into the NHL are the WHL, OHL, and Q. If we had a massive NCAA system that churned out endless money, with larger stadiums than NHL teams, who also spent more on practice facilities than NHL teams, then the three major junior leagues would quickly become obsolete, so kids would go to school. IMO that's what makes it systematic at the national level. Rose bowl stadium is what, 100K+ seating? That's like 35% more than an NFL stadium. This is also why NCAA hockey is pretty junk compared to the big four, because kids will just come here and play Major junior.
In basketball, no one has any issues with the one and done. In football, its well documented that guys like Lawrence, Odell, etc are just there to make the NFL (college is just a holding tank for them). I think it becomes very apparent in major junior around 17-19 whether you're going to get drafted and hit an AHL team. I don't think it's the end of the world that these guys go and play in junior, age out at 20 and not make the NHL with no education. They can still go to University at 20 years old - so I wouldn't indict the NHL for ruining peoples futures. Besides, if you played for a major junior team, you probably have a pretty good head-start being hired when you're done University - since corporations love to hire the ex-athlete, either as a trophy employee (This guy won a memorial cup, +1 corporate morale!) or because they think he's got the right work ethic from all the work put into getting to major junior, which will transfer well into their office.
EDIT - I also want to speculate that I really don't think the NFL can challenge the NCAA. If they cut out the NCAA, and created their own development program - I think they would lose massive amounts of fans. Football may be Americas game, and the NFL may try to pass itself of as Americas league, but Football is really America's game at the collegiate level. I think there would be major blow back from fans if the NFL just told the NCAA to take a hike, people have massive loyalty to their school programs - which would suddenly stop being able to recruit elite talent.
Sorry for the length.
TL;DR - NCAA is too big and too rich. Canada never depended on University athletic programs for the growth of hockey talent, and the best way into the NHL remains major junior. So as a result, kids go into the major junior in Canada. Kids go into NCAA in the US because they have nothing else. Different national development programs.
