The share of incoming students in the College identifying as Black fell for the third consecutive year in academic year 2025–26, while the proportion who were male increased to its highest level in decades, according to detailed UChicago enrollment data released last week.

The University reports data on its first-year classes annually in the Common Data Set (CDS), a standardized survey that asks institutions nationwide to disclose student demographics, high school academic performance, and financial aid awards, among other statistics.

The College enrolled just 71 Black first-year students last year, down from 97 in 2024 and over 150 three years ago, the University reported in the CDS. The number of white students showed a corresponding slight increase, while enrollment among other demographic groups stayed roughly unchanged year over year. Black students made up about five percent of domestic students of known race in the Class of 2029.

The CDS release comes two admissions cycles after the Supreme Court ruled in 2023 that colleges and universities could not explicitly factor applicants’ race into their admissions decisions, effectively banning affirmative action policies favoring historically disadvantaged demographic groups. The University had submitted a brief in the case opposing an affirmative action ban.

Without affirmative action, many selective universities have admitted fewer Black and Hispanic students and more white and Asian students, though those shifts have been uneven across institutions. At UChicago, white and Asian shares of domestic first-time enrollment have climbed by about three percentage points each since the decision took effect, while Black and Hispanic enrollment shares have dropped by three and four points respectively.

The number of new first-years who did not report their race to the University jumped sharply last year, from 52 to 126, or seven percent of the Class of 2029. International students, the third-largest demographic group in the College after white and Asian students, stayed roughly constant at about 18 percent of the first-year class—the first time that proportion has not increased since UChicago began releasing the CDS after the 2021–22 academic year.

The College also continued a years-long climb in male enrollment, the CDS release showed: more than 58 percent of the Class of 2029 identified as male, a three-point jump from the previous year and up from 52 percent for the Class of 2025. That weight toward male students persisted even as the College reported nearly 5,000 more female applicants than male ones.

UChicago had not welcomed an incoming undergraduate class with as high a proportion of male students since fall 1987, according to National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) data.

The University is an outlier when it comes to gender breakdown. Nationally, women comprised 57 percent of undergraduates in fall 2022. The only other Ivy Plus institutions with more male than female first-year enrollees last year—the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Stanford University, and Dartmouth College—also had more male than female applicants. Even so, none had a higher share of male first-year enrollees than UChicago.

Fifty-six percent of undergraduates at the University were male last academic year, per the CDS, as were 54 percent of graduate students.

The College admission rate for male students—at about 5.9 percent—was 66 percent higher than the rate for female students, which was 3.5 percent. That gap has widened every year since the University began filling out the CDS.

Many selective universities have for years admitted men at higher rates than women in order to enroll classes with rough gender parity despite female-dominated applicant pools, but UChicago’s gender admissions gap is particularly wide. MIT—where nearly two-thirds of applicants are male—is the only Ivy Plus school with a larger gap.

The CDS also allows schools to include admission statistics for students who do not identify as male or female, though many peer institutions report negligible numbers of such applicants. In the new CDS release, UChicago reported over 1,000 applicants of unknown sex, but no admitted students in the category. A University spokesperson did not respond to questions about how it categorizes these applicants.

The overall admission rate, 4.5 percent, was unchanged last year after several years of decreases.

Transfer student enrollment increased for the third consecutive year, with 311 new transfers arriving at UChicago last fall, up from 74 in fall 2022. That increase appears to be driven primarily by rising transfer applications, which have more than tripled over the past four years.

Those increases come amid an apparent focus on soliciting transfer applicants in recent years. The University added a transfer early decision option during the 2020–21 admissions cycle—one of the only top-ranked schools to do so, along with Northwestern University—and launched a new Transfer Student Office last year.

Even with applications growing, the transfer admission rate—11.8 percent—has remained significantly higher than the first-year admit rate.

The University did not respond directly to questions about shifts in student demographics, gender disparities in admissions, or transfer enrollment.

“Year-to-year fluctuations in Common Data Set numbers can stem from changes in CDS reporting requirements, efforts to align reporting with [the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System], and data availability,” a University spokesperson wrote to the Maroon, referring to the NCES’s higher education dataset.

The share of first-years awarded financial aid rebounded last year to 36.5 percent, up from a low of 33 percent for the Class of 2028.

The share of instructional faculty members who are minorities shrank from 26 percent to 21 percent last year, per the CDS, which includes some limited data on faculty demographics. International instructional faculty members appeared to drop significantly as well after a sharp rise in 2024, but the University spokesperson attributed the shift to definitional changes.