@Gudmom many RPI alumni would wholeheartedly agree with you about removing Shirley Jackson, not because of her treatment of male vs. female students, but because of her attitudes about students in general. Yes, RPI and other tech schools tailor their merit aid to shape their classes. If they didn’t, they would have even fewer young women apply, because those same students are being courted by all of the tech schools.
You say your son has no privilege, but that’s like a poor white many denying he has privilege - it exists in so many small ways that many don’t recognize. In classrooms around the country, white males are less likely to be questioned when they want to take advanced math and science classes - girls are still often steered in other directions.
As for Cornell, the female applicants may be a more self-selective group. I noticed this at my youngest daughters STEM-focused magnet school. Their application process is a lottery, with no prequalification. The vast majority of the girls who apply are well prepared to succeed in their STEM classes. No so, with the boys. At their orientation they are tested for math placement. All of the girls in her entering class (6th grade) were place in either accelerated math or Algebra 1. The lowest math class was all male, most likely because girls at that level wouldn’t bother applying. If the average SAT scores of the admitted females at Cornell were in fact 20 points higher than the males, it suggests either the male applicant pool had a broader range of scores, or admissions for the males was more holistic. If they had offered acceptances based on SAT scores, perhaps the percentage of women accepted would have been even greater.