A single person looking to find a partner is in essence selling something: themselves. When selling anything it's important to consider the target market.
If the market isn't interested in what someone is selling there's a few options: 1) Change the product 2) Find a different market
Changing the behavior of the market is not an option because, unless it's a really really desirable product, the market isn't likely to budge.
So educated women that the article is referring could decide to not lower their standards but the risk they face is being alone.
Because what is humanity without it's biology?
Instinct doesn't belong to the individual, it belongs to the species. And life doesn't care atoll about abstract moral principal. That's just syntactic sugar to help us manage and grow the hive given biological impulse. When we overcome a natural impulse guess what? It's a natural impulse doing that too. If we overcome all natural impulse (how?) this species is finished and are something else, certainly not "humanity" at that point.
Right now what really drives us around is 10's of thousands of years older than the beginning of writing and cities. At least.
What's wrong with that?
But at present we are behaviorally closer to monkeys even if we dress up in suits and have rules and values. Which don't (unlike what we generally conceive) have any eternal significance beyond being various versions of conventions such as "who gets to pick the lice off the alpha male first".
Point being, what we are is the reality of what we have to work with. Mating included. Puritan scolders will forever fail and life will keep right on going until the machine (if that ever happens).
I for one, do value these traits. If I were to choose between two equally looking girls, I would choose the smarter. On the other hand, I have a strict lower bound for appearance, and no amount of education or accomplishment can compensate for being under that threshold. We can still talk about programming though!
Simple answer is, it's instinctual.