Think you're overstating it. By and large, the top college players prioritize football over their education (much the same as other elite college athletes).
The NCAA strictly limits practice time for its soccer players, as in other sports. The season is also very short. And obviously, being a student is a time and energy consuming thing.
If you are going to be an elite soccer player, by the time you are 18-19, soccer is your full time job. What's great about the NCAA setup is that it provides an enormous home for talented older players who haven't quite made it to keep participating at a competitive level into their early twenties.
Elite soccer countries often don't have that, they dump kids out of the system at 17-18 who might otherwise become late-developing stars, and only the ones crazy enough to ignore their work future and scrounge around the semi-pro circuit keep going.
They're trying to set it up so that college kids can be playing with USL teams in their offseason, which would be a good step, but it's still not good enough for an elite player.
And that's without mentioning the overtime and substitution rules for college soccer which make it an awful player development environment, and thus incentivize poor player development practices in the pipeline towards college soccer.
This is all later development stuff, but there are a lot of problems currently with turning 15-16 year old American wunderkinds into 19-20 year old professionals.
