Dude. I respect you consulting your wife, but everything you write below is inaccurate.
First of all, while the CHL education package is a binding contract, the benefits disappear pretty quickly if you go on to play professional hockey.
And if you play one season and one game of pro hockey - at any level - your education package goes poof. How much is it worth then?
Did you forget about that?
Yes, Connor McDavid is not getting an Education Package from the OHL. But, what you write is not accurate. It's only if you play a full year of pro after the age of 21.
But I'm curious ... what kind of scholarships do NCAA teams offer their players who even attend a Pro camp, much less play a game of Pro?
You also only get one year of school as part of the education package for each season played in the CHL - so if you need five years to get through, say, Dalhousie, you'd better hope you've played enough Major Junior to cover it. The average CHL player doesn't play in the CHL long enough for the package to cover them completing a bachelor's degree.
Inaccurate. The CHL also pays for university tuition while a player is in the league ... so an 18, 19, 20 year old who takes courses part-time while playing in the CHL only needs 3 years to complete their degree. If you look at USports rosters you'll see them littered with ex-CHL players doing Graduate studies because of this.
There are also rules on where you can use the package, largely based on where you live and/or what team you play for - so while you COULD go to Dal, McGill, or Queen's, you likely won't be able to unless you grew up near those schools or played near those schools.
That sentence is a bald-faced lie.
The amount of the CHL package is based on the tuition of the university the player identifies which can be either in their home state/province OR where their current team is located. That establishes a baseline amount. But the player can apply that scholarship to ANY post-secondary institution.
I once recruited a WHL player from Vancouver Island who played in Saskatoon, Lethbridge, and Portland, used the first three years of his package to pay tuition and books at Military College in Ontario, and the last two years to fund his PhD in Regina.
If you think SLU is a low-ranking school, or that the CHL education package is better because "the Ivy League schools don't give scholarships," you're just proving how little you actually know about those schools. The Ivies give every student the opportunity to attend regardless of financial need - so it's pretty likely that if your family is even middle class, you're going to be paying significantly less than full price.
SLU is a Liberal Arts college, which by definition makes it a low-ranking school.
Ivy League school packages are never full, and are based on household income. If you're a middle-class Canadian you're looking at an unaffordable amount.
How do I know this?
My wife is a teacher and college counselor at a Northeastern prep school with a hockey program that puts kids into the USHL annually.
So, all of her advice is based on the inaccuracies you state above about the CHL?
I understand that the NCAA vs CHL calculus will be different for prep school kids from New England versus middle-class kids from Canada. But, so should you.