The landscape has gotten worse. Lot's of Junior kids hanging around because their seasons were cancelled has put a real bubble of many, many players in the system.
Too much to read this whole thread, but here is the reality, that most AAA club will avoid telling you:
There are roughly 40 D1 hockey teams, each of whom by NCAA rule have 18 full scholarships they can award. Though they will sometimes split them, the max is 25. That's across all 4 years. So 180 players a year will get a scholarship. Marks DO count. There are more spots available for a 3.5GPA kid than a 2.5 GPA kid, and so on. Each team can give a scholarship to just a couple of kids with low marks, and those spots are valuable.
There is no D2 hockey. D3 hockey does not give out athletic scholarships (by NCAA rule), so you will have to have the marks to justify an academic scholarship. Will they look favorably on a kid they want? Sure. But the marks can't suck.
There are about 30,000 18/19 year old players registered with USAHockey. Those are not good odds.
Colleges also don't want 17 and 18 year olds. They want 19-20 year olds at youngest. The expectation is that you will play at least 1 year of high level Jr before college.
D1 scholarships go almost exclusively to USHL players. Yes, there are some NAHL's. And lot's of tier 3 leagues will claim to send kids to D1 - they are pretty much full of shit. Tier 3 exists for kids to keep playing to try to make Tier 2 or Tier 1, and for kids that can't (but should) give up on the dream.
Roughly, if your high school kid is not being talked to by a tier 1 or 2 Jr team you should be looking at other options. And I mean talked to - not just invited to pre-draft camps, but actual main camps where they make the first cut at least. And I don't mean the parents schmoozing with the scouts. If your kid is on the list, the scouts will pull them out of the locker room to talk to them after games at tournaments. Otherwise then you are almost certainly fooling yourself if you think you are going to ride hockey to college. If your kid is playing AA, the odds are far, far worse - almost impossible. If your kid wasn't drafted by the USHL or WHL, it's an uphill climb.
Counting on college hockey is a TERRIBLE plan for paying for school. You might as well just go to Vegas and hope for the best.
For all the all the above, starry-eyed parents will cite counter examples. They are the very, very rare exceptions.