About one in 50 NCAA football players (2%) will ever go pro, with even less making it long enough to have a career and others going broke. You can argue about compensation for players and whatever else, but the average college costs (tuition and board) vary from $20,000/year for in state public college students to $50,000 for private (again average).
While the numbers is still low, if we limit the pool to just the major conferences (ACC, Big Ten, Big 12, Pac-12 and SEC), the odds of a college football player making it to the pros are much better...slightly more than one in ten. Since we are talking about bowl games, such a limitation is reasonable.
We estimate that 3.9% of draft-eligible Division I players were chosen in the 2017 NFL draft (247 / 6,254). Limiting this calculation to subdivision, 6.9% of FBS players were estimated to be drafted (233 / 3,398), as compared to 0.5% of FCS players (14 / 2,856). Narrowing further to the five Division I conferences with autonomous governance (ACC, Big Ten, Big 12, Pac-12 and SEC), we estimate that 11% were drafted (183 / 1,735). Accounting for Arena League and CFL opportunities, the NCAA to Total Professional figures are estimated as 4.7% for Division I ([247+ 47] / 6,254), 7.9% for FBS ([233 + 34] / 3,398) and 12% for the five autonomous conferences ([183 + 19] / 1,735).
http://www.ncaa.org/about/resources/research/football
Sure, but the school still supports tons of athletes on scholarship that will never sniff a professional roster. Not to mention the fact that the schools need the money generated to support all their non-revenue generating sports (typically all except football). What do you think would happen to virtually every women's sport and every male sport except probably basketball if schools had to pay their athletes?
And before head coach salaries are brought up, the difference between a good head coach and a bad one is the difference between the athletic department losing money or profiting. I'm a University of Florida grad and fan, and over our last decade of mediocrity we've trending down revenue wise - being 3rd in the country in 2009 when we had Urban Meyer, falling to 8th in 2017 (4th in our own conference). It is still a lot of revenue, but we also have top facilities for non revenue sports such as softball, swimming, track and field, etc...
These athletes, while you could argue they are being taken advantage of, provide the opportunity for nearly every single other athlete on a scholarship to attend school. And you can't usually argue that, as most college players aren't developed physically enough to play in the NFL until at least Junior year.
