They could have, but that’s background information supporting the article’s topic, not its findings. You and several others will walk away with that finding from their research, and I will walk away having read and understood the interest in better understanding how attrition affects outcomes. I wouldn’t have any clue that I could learn that from the title you suggest. If they’d tried to cram the point of interest I found into the title, it would be derided as editorializing. The title is probably the best they could do: we had a hypothesis. Implicit in that is some findings and some further line of questioning. Sure that’s “clickbait” in a literal sense, but it’s a title. If you could fit the article in the title you wouldn’t have a distinction between articles and titles. You’d have tweet. Just one. Choose your wording carefully!