Dropdown Value from DB Entry

Question

You’re not actually outputting the selected attribute into the <option> tag. Look at your printf() format:

'<option value="%u">%s</option>'

%u is there for the month’s number value, and %s is there for month’s name, but you’re not including the last argument from the result of selected().

Your printf() needs to look like this:

printf(
    '<option value="%u" %s>%s</option>', 
    $num, 
    selected( $birth_date_month, $num, false ), 
    $month
);

Note that I swapped the order of the arguments, because selected needs to be output before the month name.