Harvard Law School visiting researcher Michael McCann has a study showing that high schoolers entering the NBA Draft “average more points, more rebounds, and more assists than the average NBA player.” I’m not so sure history is a fair sample – McCann seems to concede that the good record arises from self-selection that is itself the product of the disincentives maintained by the NBA to skipping college – but the study is reported in this article; judge for yourself.
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As you suggest yourself, correlation does not prove causation. 12 year olds who go to college are smarter than average, but that doesn’t mean sending all kids to college at that age will make them smarter.
In education, teachers noticed that kids with high self-esteem were high achievers, but they got the cause and effect backward, and so tried to boost achievement by boosting esteem.
To see if an early NBA career hurts or helps you would have to find a way to rate players’ abilities and then compare the lifetime earnings of those that went straight to the NBA versus those that went to college.
One more thing, I certainly agree with those that say college money sports are exploitive. Everyone makes millions _except_ the players? We really need to separate athletics from academics like they do in Europe.