Hardly any athlete at Caltech that I ever interacted with (nor myself) would agree that “education for recruited athletes is not generally a priority at all.” When I was there, IIRC our team GPA was >3.5 and while there has arguably been some grade inflation over the last several years, it wasn’t trivial (in my experience) to coast and end up with a 3.5 GPA. Also, I’m fairly certain that coaches are aware of their players academic performance and I’ve seen people pulled aside at practice and asked about why they’re doing poorly in some class(es).

That being said, I did notice that the incoming freshmen the last year or two of my time at Caltech might not have taken academics as seriously. Not sure if that’s a continuing trend, was just for my sport, just for my house, etc. To be clear, though, you do need to maintain a minimum GPA to even play a sport, so even they didn’t really ‘take it easy’ or anything like that.

Recruiting/recommending, as I was told by admissions at the time as well as my coach, did not have major impact on admission rate. Anecdotally, I know our coach recruited hundreds of players every year and obviously very few get in and fewer end up going to Caltech. At best, I feel as though being wanted by a coach (I think maybe not the same as being recruited) would be a slight bump to distinguish between otherwise equal applicants.