I don't doubt the trends that are being reported. As I said, I dispute the narrative being fit to the data:
Samantha Brandauer, who runs Dickinson College’s study-abroad office, told me she has experienced this firsthand. In her past job at Gettysburg College, she teamed up with a colleague to convene student focus groups on why men didn’t go abroad and what the college could do about it. What she discovered was a “bro mentality” among men in college—a culture in which male students don’t want to leave their friends to study abroad and are heavily influenced by their classmates in making choices about what to do in college. “Part of this is a messaging problem, because the way we talk about study abroad as a transformative experience just doesn’t resonate with college-age men,” Brandauer says. “They don’t want to be transformed.”
I may have missed something in my reading, but to my eye this is the only explanation offered for this trend in this article. And in my estimation, this is a lazy explanation that fits a political narrative a little too easily.
And yes, I am hiding behind a thowaway account, but I’m not complaining about treatment of me or people like me. This is a trend I’ve noticed in articles that blur the boundary between editorial and reporting, and I don’t think it is fair to anyone.