Something strange is happening at the University of Chicago. And as a former UChicago admissions officer, alumna, and a now senior admissions consultant for Ivy Coach, a college consultancy, I can’t help but wonder why.

More than 58% of UChicago’s Class of 2029, the most recently reported cohort in the Common Data Set, identifies as male, up three percentage points in a year and from 52% for the Class of 2025. UChicago hasn’t welcomed an incoming class this male-skewing since 1987, when “Dirty Dancing” hit theaters and nobody put Baby in a corner. But it seems UChicago is putting women there.

Few highly selective universities enroll more male than female students. MIT, Dartmouth, and Stanford have recently been among them, but their applicant pools also skew male. Tulane has long enrolled a heavily female-skewing student body, so that admissions advantage for males can at least be understood as an effort to approach gender balance.

But that’s not UChicago’s problem. UChicago is enrolling substantially more men than women. Nearly 5,000 more female than male students applied to the Class of 2029: 24,578 versus 19,929. Yet UChicago admitted just 870 young women compared with 1,169 young men, acceptance rates of roughly 3.5% and 5.9%.

As a former UChicago admissions officer, I know how the school builds its classes. Thanks to three different binding admissions pathways (Summer Student Early Notification, Early Decision I, and Early Decision II), the university has extraordinary control over who enrolls.

During my tenure from 2019 to 2022, I was told that about half of the incoming class was admitted through a binding round. While UChicago does not publicly release their binding vs. non-binding acceptance rates, one need only look at peer institutions to surmise that the admissions chances for those applying non-binding are significantly worse. It’s why UChicago’s yield has climbed to roughly 88%, higher than even Harvard’s.

So when UChicago enrolls a class that’s 58% male from an applicant pool with nearly 25% more female applicants, I have a hard time chalking it up to happenstance. UChicago is exceptionally good at constructing the class it wants.

So what might be going on to motivate such a disparity? One answer could lie in the growth of the Economics Department. UChicago gave rise to the Chicago school of economics, was home to Milton Friedman, and remains home to Freakonomics’ Steven Levitt. Over two decades, the economics major has doubled. Given that only about one-third of economics undergraduates across universities are female, has UChicago’s singular focus on this department perhaps contributed to a gender imbalance in the undergraduate population?

Or perhaps more external factors are at play. One possibility, and to be clear, it’s only speculation, is the influence of the U.S. News & World Report college ranking, the ranking about which every university pretends not to care. This year, one significant methodology change was an Earnings by Major factor measuring graduates’ earnings four years after graduation. U.S. News compares earnings within fields, so the new metric cannot explain a gender imbalance that has been building for years. But economic outcomes now count directly toward a university’s ranking. And given the persistent gender pay gap, with men still outearning women overall, it raises a fair question about whether such rankings could create incentives that influence how universities shape their classes going forward.

Regardless of the reason, I believe UChicago’s applicants and students deserve to know what’s driving this significant break from peer institutions and the current national reality wherein 58% of college students are female. That question is especially pressing given the university’s recent plans to expand its undergraduate population from 7,500 to 9,000 students. Will those additional spots continue this striking trend, or will UChicago begin to reverse it?

I know firsthand that admissions offices build classes student by student. UChicago received nearly 5,000 more applications from females than males, yet produced a class that’s nearly 60% male. UChicago knows how it built this class. The question is why? In this year’s Convocation address, UChicago professor Kenneth Warren urged students to “think deeply about the world around them.” UChicago should take its own advice. The numbers are staring the university in the face. Now it needs to explain them.

Hannah Skaran, a senior admissions consultant at the college consulting firm Ivy Coach, served as an admissions officer at the University of Chicago Office of College Admissions.