Marquette's Acceptance Rate Fell From 87.48% to 78.02% in Three Years — And a Rare Residency Table Shows the Rest

Marquette University's acceptance rate has fallen every year for three years running, and the drop is not small. For the Fall 2023 entering class, Marquette admitted 87.48% of applicants. One year later, Fall 2024, that fell to 81.34%. By Fall 2025, it was 78.02% — a 9.46-point drop in three cycles, while the applicant pool nearly grew by a third, from 15,657 to 20,002. That is a real trend across three consecutive Common Data Set filings, not a one-year blip, and it is the number a family evaluating Marquette's odds today should anchor on.

Marquette is a private university, and most private schools leave the Common Data Set's optional residency breakdown blank. Marquette does not: it has filled in the in-state, out-of-state, and international applicant/admit/enrolled table every year for at least the last three filings, which means the numbers below — a level of detail rarely available at a private school — come straight from Marquette's own reporting rather than an estimate.

The Decomposition

All twelve figures are from Marquette's Common Data Set, Section C1 residency breakdown, for the three most recent entering-class filings. In each year, the three residency rows sum exactly to Marquette's own published total — no rounding gaps, no unaccounted "Unknown" category. Each year's residency total also independently matches that same filing's separate by-gender C1 table, which is a second, internal cross-check built into Marquette's own reporting, not something this article had to construct.

Show the math: For Fall 2025, 3,302 of 4,282 in-state applicants were admitted, and 3,302 / 4,282 = 77.11%. Out-of-state, 11,282 of 14,157 applicants were admitted, and 11,282 / 14,157 = 79.69%. Across the full applicant pool, 15,606 of 20,002 applicants were admitted, and 15,606 / 20,002 = 78.02% — the headline rate. Run the same division on the two earlier years and the decline shows up cleanly: 13,697 / 15,657 = 87.48% for Fall 2023, and 15,212 / 18,701 = 81.34% for Fall 2024. Three separate divisions, three separate Common Data Set filings, one consistent downward line.

Admit Rate vs. Yield: A Pattern That Holds for Three Straight Years

The residency pattern at Marquette is consistent across all three years on record. In every year, out-of-state applicants were admitted at a higher rate than in-state applicants: 79.69% vs. 77.11% in Fall 2025, 83.16% vs. 78.43% in Fall 2024, and 89.52% vs. 83.82% in Fall 2023. Read on its own, that could look like an out-of-state advantage.

It isn't the whole picture, and yield corrects it. In the same three years, in-state admits enrolled at roughly double the out-of-state rate: 21.96% vs. 10.40% in Fall 2025, 21.66% vs. 12.52% in Fall 2024, and 21.25% vs. 11.90% in Fall 2023. Wisconsin admits who get an offer from Marquette show up at close to twice the rate of admitted out-of-state students, year after year. The two numbers pull in opposite directions at once: out-of-state applicants clear Marquette's admissions bar somewhat more easily, but a much smaller share of them ultimately enroll. Admit rate and yield answer different questions, and this is one of the few places a Marquette applicant can see both, broken out by residency, at a private school.

International applicants sit apart from both patterns: the lowest admit rate of the three groups every year (65.39% to 71.34%) and by far the lowest yield (1.47% to 4.90%), though Marquette's Common Data Set does not explain why, and none is claimed here.

What Marquette Doesn't Publish

Marquette's admissions pages prominently feature named undergraduate colleges — Business Administration, Engineering, Nursing, and others a family researching Marquette will likely search for by name. No admit rate by college or school exists in any Marquette-published source checked, including the Common Data Set and Marquette's Office of Institutional Research and Analysis (OIRA) public reports page. The closest related dashboard, OIRA's "New Undergraduate First-Time Students" report, is filed under Student Enrollment rather than Admissions and reports the composition of students who enrolled — not how many applied or were admitted to any given college. That is enrolled-class composition, not an admit rate, and the two should not be treated as interchangeable. If a page or forum claims a specific acceptance rate for Marquette Business, Engineering, or Nursing, it is not sourced to anything Marquette has published.

Marquette also has no Early Decision plan. Its Common Data Set answers "No" to the Early Decision question in all three of the most recent filings, and the numeric fields for an ED cohort are blank in every one of them — there is no round-based admit-rate split to report because there is no ED applicant pool to report it from. Marquette does offer nonbinding Early Action (November 15 close, December 20 notification), but the Common Data Set only records that the plan exists and its dates, not applicant or admit counts for it. No EA-specific admit rate is published anywhere else Marquette-owned.

One confidence note worth stating plainly: the Fall 2025 applied count of 20,002 is corroborated outside the Common Data Set — Marquette's own News Center reported "over 20,000 applications" for that cycle in a move-in-day story, which agrees with the CDS figure. The admitted counts, in all three years, have no second source beyond the Common Data Set filings themselves.

What This Means for Your Application

The clearest signal in this data isn't the residency split — it's the three-year trend. Marquette got noticeably more selective in three consecutive cycles as its applicant pool grew, and there is no reason to assume that direction reverses for the next admissions cycle. If you're building your list, the honest planning number is closer to Marquette's most recent rate, 78.02%, than to older figures you might find elsewhere still citing the high-80s.

Within that trend, the residency numbers matter differently depending on where you live: Wisconsin applicants face a slightly tighter admit rate than out-of-state applicants in every year on record, but they also enroll at close to double the rate once admitted — worth knowing if you're deciding how seriously to treat a Marquette offer against competing schools. And if you were hoping to find a Nursing- or Business-specific acceptance rate to plan around, none exists in Marquette's public data; treat any number you see claiming otherwise with skepticism.

Our free college list builder can help you weigh Marquette's three-year trend and residency pattern against the rest of your list, instead of relying on a single blended headline number. Since Marquette has no Early Decision plan, timing your application around its Early Action and Regular Decision dates matters more than it would elsewhere — our application deadline tracker keeps both alongside every other school on your list. And if you want to talk through how a falling admit rate and a residency-based yield gap should shape your Marquette strategy, a free strategy call is a low-pressure way to work through it.