Last week Princeton released statistics on its admissions for the Class of 2017. 49.8% of the admits are women, continuing a streak of 267 years in which women have failed to achieve numerical advantage in any Princeton class. Go men!

All sarcasm aside, the facts are that as far as I know, Princeton has never admitted more women than men in any class in the coed era (starting in 1969). My source is the Daily Princetonian, which reports on these numbers each year in April. Sometimes the statistics are reported in percentages rather than raw numbers, in which case a 50% result could indicate more women than men, due to rounding. 2000, 2008, 2009, and 2010 were 50% years, and I could not find the numbers for 2002 and

1. Here’s the chart from my previous post, updated with this year’s number:

At a time in which women are getting better grades than men, scoring higher on standardized tests, graduating at a higher rate from high school, and going to college in greater numbers, it is truly remarkable that just exactly enough of these superior women are foregoing application to Princeton so that Princeton’s gender-blind admission process results in a class of no more than 50% women, year after year.

Or could there be another explanation?