Even in creative fields. All those young actors spending years on underpaid bit parts on off-Broadway and low budget Hollywood productions. Most of them make less than an average blue collar job.

See also college athletes. A lineman at a top-tier football school in the U.S. ends up with all sorts of chronic injuries, possibly including brain damage. Very few of them make it to the pros. None are supposed to be paid at all except in kind for degrees, room, and board.

Blue collar jobs pay reasonably well after a few years. You might have to work pretty hard and hustle to move up the food chain. Trades gigs can be "nice house and a boat" levels of lucrative.

This is exactly why I think those football programs should be professionalized. The program should be licensed by the school - logos and all - but completely financially independent. Obviously, the money says otherwise ( football donors are a very significant stream of income ). And you'd quickly develop a "New York Yankees' problem - wealthy programs would have more money.

I have a Son In Law Candidate who is physically arranged like a left offensive tackle. Even in high school, the six hour practices put him off it.

Part of me says that "the love of the game" should be encouraged, but as you note... the costs are substantial. And I think the real money in sports is trading on the player's name, anyway.

The only people I know from either were from Perot Systems or EDS before, which is largely extinct. They didn't have it so bad.

I am sure it's a cause of pain for people but somehow, game dev. work being that way seems inevitable. My own exposure to the antediluvian music business ( back in them '80s ) was that it was The Island of the Lost Boys from "Pinocchio".