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Any explanation invoking "neoliberalism" unironically should be treated with extreme skepticism. I have a suspicion the explanation is a more pedestrian (though not less concern) factor than the deep-seated moral rot in society that forbids us from torturing children: low-friction hyperstimuli. It used to be that if you wanted to see naked ladies or go gambling, for example, it entailed a certain amount of effort and exposure. You had to leave the house and go to a strip club or casino and be seen doing it. Now you can do all that without getting out of bed, and without the attendant risk of humiliation for being seen by the wrong person. That's going to have a certain... anesthetizing effect on people who are susceptible to those vices or otherwise agentically challenged.
(Aside specifically re: ineffectual school dances. I've seen this subject come up before, and all I can say is that this is elders cargo culting rituals of their own youth without any of the attendant actual institutions needed to make them work. Yeah, it turns out a bunch of adolescent boys who don't dance recreationally and aren't allowed to talk to girls 99.9% of the time aren't going to do so hot when you throw them in a room with a bunch of girls they don't know.)
"Military school" is not the same thing as the military academies. The service academies, while they are not necessarily academically elite in the way an Ivy is, are still prestigious and competitive institutions with far more applicants than spots. Their graduates are, on the whole, "elite human capital."
Military schools are not that. While I'm sure there are many perfectly respectable institutions for martially inclined children of Good Families, the overall connotation of a military school was and is a disciplinary institution for delinquents. The kind of place a judge offers you as an alternative to juvie. The author invokes elite international students, but to cast a critical/uncharitable eye on the examples he presents, it looks a lot like foreign elites looking for a place to dump their underachieving sons because better institutions wouldn't take them.
As to the status of military service, I have to ask what the point of comparison is. I think it's fair to say that the prestige associated with military service has declined since the 2000s, but that is primarily a recession of the post-9/11 war fever. From a broader perspective, it is more or less as respectable as it has ever been to be a common soldier.
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