My dad brought this up last night, to support his belief in the oppression of the white male on college campuses. Which is bullshit, and political correctness on campus is surely not a reason for this trend, but this does seem like a real trend and I'm wondering why it would be happening.
My answer at the time was there tend to be more non-college opportunities for men - trade school, apprenticeships, things like that, which I believe are overwhelmingly male. Also sort of similar to things I've seen about the "reverse gender gap" in Mongolia - men are more likely to take over a family business and will learn the skills they need working in the business, whereas women need to go to college to learn other skills because their future is not so laid out for them. College is not the marker for success it once was, and a lot of men might see more non-college opportunities for them that women don't.
There might also be a mental health aspect - I think women tend to deal with mental health better? Which might lead to them being able to deal with uncertainty and stress these days better than men, leading to more men dropping out. I don't have any statistics there to know if that's even true or not though.
I don't know if any of those answers hold any water, but this does seem like a real trend from what I can tell and I'm wondering why it might be occurring.
I feel like there's also a materialist / Marxist analysis we can layer on top of this. Something about capital demands different skills from workers than they did 50 or 100 years ago. Probably more demand for workers with better social and language skills which at that age, which women may possess more of. But this is barely a half-baked analysis, someone with better theory skills can maybe carry this one over the goal line.
Here you go: As work in the imperial core has shifted from manufacturing to the service sector, demand for workers has shifted towards workers with better social, linguistic, and academic skills which to women tend to be better adapted. Customers also find women much easier to interact with (read: yell at), so a larger percentage of the workforce in the core is becoming female, as the majority of the workforce is becoming increasingly based around customer service, healthcare, healthcare support, food service, personal care, social services, and academia.
These changing demands have affected school curricula which have shifted from producing docile, subservient factory workers to docile, subservient consumers and customer service workers, and only furthered the already existing academic performance gap of female students above male students.
Also, more importantly, women attending college has become progressively less stigmatized over the past decades, meaning the 50% of the population that was attending University at far below average rates is now attending at the average rate, meaning there is more competition than ever for spots, while universities are simultaneously reducing entering class sizes relative to population growth in order to maintain and increase prestige and exclusivity to help justify tuition increases. Way more people fitting into fewer spots relative to population has resulted in even stricter competition of k-12 grades for entrance.