It's strange to me that most of the comments here seem to be focused on gender relations rather than what the article was talking about - educational and occupational attainment. I don't think romantic aspirations have anything to do with why young men are not achieving. Rather, we have grown up in a fearful and repressive society, with 9/11 and the wars, 2008, Snowden, and now Covid. Many have grown up being drugged and told they are broken for behavior that was considered normal once. The broken economy that rewards only capital and resigns the rest to drudgery offers no incentive to participate or care. On top of all this, we are still expected to be "men" and never complain, never mention a feeling that isn't lust or grand ambition, and never show weakness. Faced with all this, why not drop out and find refuge in a bottle, pipe, or needle?
Well, partly it's because discussing that means discussing the causes, and the most robust claims out there about what's going on boil down to "it's the fault of female teachers".
For example why are boys being diagnosed with ADHD so much more than girls, why are they on so many more drugs, well, supposedly it's because female teachers - who have very clear and proven biases towards girls - are much more likely to react to normal boyish energy by getting frustrated and being unable to handle it. So once the psychiatric world gave them this neat excuse-in-a-box that let them blame boys, and even better, an off switch for children, instead of learning how to handle boys they started just telling parents their children were neurotic and broken.
A related issue is grading. Girls get better grades than boys. There's a neat experiment out there that appears to show this is caused by teachers having a built-in bias towards children of their own gender, but, the bias is much more extreme in women. This would be totally expected - feminism practically insists that female-female loyalty is a a moral virtue and to NOT give the sisters a helping hand makes you a bad woman. Women routinely discriminate in all sorts of ways against men and in favour of women, so much so that feminism is currently ripping itself apart through debates on whether trans women should be treated as women or not (often, for the purposes of allocating perks!). That it happens in education too is only to be expected. Until people start routinely classifying feminism as an unacceptable form of hatred, boys outcomes won't start improving. Going back to gender segregated schools might even help, although I'm a bit shocked to see myself typing that, because I never supported such schools before. It's just so unclear what can be done about these sorts of cultural problems except keeping vulnerable boys away from places where women can discriminate against them.
