Denver's Acceptance Rate Jumped 8 Points in One Year — Yield Didn't Move

The University of Denver's published acceptance rate for the Fall 2025 entering class was 85.38%, from 14,205 admits out of 16,637 first-time, first-year applicants. That's up sharply from 77.29% (14,519 of 18,785) the year before — an 8.09-point jump in a single admissions cycle. The number that makes this worth a second look isn't the admit rate itself, it's what didn't move alongside it: yield, the share of admitted students who actually enrolled, stayed roughly flat near 8% in both years. Denver admitted a meaningfully larger share of its applicant pool and did not convert more of those extra admits into enrolled students.

The Decomposition

All figures are from Denver's Common Data Set, Section C1 residency supplement, for the Fall 2025 entering cohort. The three residency rows sum exactly to the stated totals.

Show the math: 4,765 of 5,623 in-state applicants were admitted, and 4,765 / 5,623 = 84.74%. Out-of-state, 8,824 of 10,033 applicants were admitted, and 8,824 / 10,033 = 87.95%. The two domestic groups sit within 3.21 points of each other — both admitting the overwhelming majority of applicants. International applicants were admitted at a noticeably tighter 62.79% (616 of 981), still far higher than the international rate at most other schools in this series, but the one group at Denver facing anything resembling genuine selectivity.

The Jump, Year Over Year

Every group's admit rate rose, and international applicants saw the largest single jump in percentage points, even though their rate remains the lowest of the three. Meanwhile Fall 2024's overall yield sat at 1,337 enrolled out of 14,519 admitted, 9.21% — not identical to Fall 2025's 8.26% (1,174 of 14,205) but in the same narrow band, while the applicant pool shrank from 18,785 to 16,637 and admits actually fell in raw count, from 14,519 to 14,205, even as the rate rose because the smaller pool moved the denominator more than the numerator. The takeaway holds either way you look at it: a materially higher admit rate did not translate into materially more enrolled students relative to how many were admitted.

A Working Early Decision Figure — Rare Enough to Note

Most schools in this series that report a Common Data Set Early Decision figure have a filing that doesn't hold up under scrutiny: the newest filing labels its Early Decision section with a prior year's cohort, but the numbers don't match what that prior year's own filing actually reported. We've documented that defect across more than a dozen schools — see our investigation of the Common Data Set Early Decision problem for the full pattern. Denver is one of the few schools where the check actually passes: three consecutive filings (Fall 2023, Fall 2024, and Fall 2025) each carry a cohort label that matches their own filing year, and each year's applicant and admit counts are genuinely different from the prior year's — no copy-forward duplication.

This is a small subset of the applicant pool — 273 of 16,637 total Fall 2025 applicants — so treat it as supplementary context, not a substitute for the overall rate. It's not the school's real acceptance rate, and Denver's Early Action plan (which it does offer) has no equivalent — the Common Data Set reports only that Early Action exists, with a deadline, but no applicant or admit count for it in any of the three filings checked. Because Early Action and Regular Decision aren't broken out separately from each other, there's no way to back into either rate by subtraction without conflating the two.

What Denver Doesn't Publish

Denver's Daniels College of Business is a name prospective students search for directly, along with the Ritchie School of Engineering & Computer Science and Denver's other undergraduate colleges. None of them has a published applicant or admit count. Denver's Common Data Set has no by-college section, and no page on the university's Institutional Research site publishes a college-level breakdown of applicants or admits. No by-major breakdown exists either. Denver also reports no numeric Early Action or Regular Decision figures, as noted above, so those specific splits aren't available from any source we could verify.

What This Means for Your Application

Denver admitted a much larger share of applicants in Fall 2025 than Fall 2024 — 85.38% versus 77.29% — across every residency group, but the share of admits who actually enroll barely budged. For your own planning, that combination means the headline rate alone isn't a great signal of how competitive Denver "feels" from the inside; a rising admit rate with flat yield is often a sign a school is casting a wider net for the same size class, not that it's getting meaningfully easier to stand out among the students who actually enroll. Denver's real Early Decision figure, while small, does show admitted rates in the low-to-mid 80s across the three years checked — genuinely useful if Denver is a top choice and you're weighing whether to commit early.

Our application deadline tracker can help you track Denver's Early Decision, Early Action, and Regular Decision deadlines against the rest of your list. If you're not sure how a rising-admit, flat-yield school like Denver should factor into your overall balance of reaches, targets, and safeties, our free college list builder is built for that kind of planning. And if you want to talk through your full strategy, a free strategy call is a low-pressure way to work through it.