I'd bet it varies a lot from school to school. Michigan has had football and basketball (scholarship) players do engineering degrees. Walks on do tough degrees pretty frequently. They have a starting receiver who wants to go to med school: I think his dad is a doctor. I'm guessing the players aren't exactly encouraged to that - you would have basically no free time being a football player and doing an engineering degree - but they're not prevented from it, either. I would guess a total football factory school like, dunno, Bama, would make sure players aren't getting those degrees.
I'd also bet that it's highly dependent on the player, too. A majority, at least, of football players are not there for school. They don't care that much about the major, so they'll just do whatever. And some that do care may not know how to advocate for themselves or how to come up with a solution if there's a must-take class during practice or something. You're responsible for your own education in college, and a big part of college is simply figuring out the byzantine college bureaucracy. You take people who may not be entirely prepared for college and then they have to go the extra mile to get a strong college education. Of course most of them will end up as psychology/communications/sports management majors.
Side note - how many of us would do things differently in college if we went back? I should have gotten a minor or double major, but instead I coasted to an easy, for me, political science degree. I should have taken an American history class. I should have had a minor in math or history, and possibly a double major with one of those. And I'm basically a model college student, and even I feel like I should have gotten more out of college. So yeah, it's hard to expect athletes to do the same.
The other thing: playing a sport should count for academic credit. It's asinine that athletes are expected to essentially work a full time job on top of school and get no credit for it. The purpose of college sports is to produce well rounded people, supposedly, but then these athletes get exactly nothing academically from dedicating a good portion of their lives to the school. This doesn't really solve the problem of athletes not getting an education, but we should acknowledge reality. Plus, I think athletes who are required to balance a 40+ hour a week job while getting a degree is super impressive, even if that degree is communications.