Every single person I have met that goes to college later in life are driven to meet their objectives regardless of their starting conditions and environments and generally a good influence to everyone around them. Since you are around his age, it should be easy to imagine what it would take for someone with his background to stay determined and commit to study for years as a 41 year old. I understand why you may be worried but it may honestly be better for your child to be around with someone older who has had time to work on themselves, know where they are going and willing to commit to get there.
Sounds like they are using analytics. Unity analytics is a separate service that is implemented by the developer to find out how players progress through their game, so they can find out things like if many players are getting stuck on a part of their game, if particular quests have poor engagement, parts of the map remain undiscovered, etc. This is a very common service to use for most games nowadays and has nothing to do with save management. As you said, there is no user sent, so all data is anonymous and aggregated to create statistics.