Temple Admits Out-of-State Applicants at a Slightly Higher Rate Than Pennsylvania Residents

Temple University's published acceptance rate for the Fall 2025 entering class was 86.22%, from 36,922 admits out of 42,824 first-time, first-year applicants. That's up from 80.45% (32,838 of 40,817) the year before. The finding worth pausing on isn't the overall jump — it's the direction of the residency gap underneath it. Applicants who live outside Pennsylvania were admitted at a slightly higher rate than in-state residents, not a lower one, which runs against the assumption a lot of families bring to a public-facing state university.

The Decomposition

All figures are from Temple'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: 12,641 of 14,512 in-state applicants were admitted, and 12,641 / 14,512 = 87.11%. Out-of-state, 21,812 of 24,878 applicants were admitted, and 21,812 / 24,878 = 87.68%. Subtract the two and out-of-state applicants were admitted at 0.57 points higher than in-state applicants — a small gap, but a real and consistent one; it's reported here without asserting a cause, since Temple's Common Data Set doesn't explain why. International applicants were admitted at 71.90% (2,469 of 3,434), noticeably below both domestic groups but still high relative to most schools in this series.

The Gap That Actually Matters Is Yield, Not Admit Rate

Admit rate isn't where Temple's residency story lives — yield is. In-state admits enrolled at 26.41%, roughly three times the out-of-state yield of 8.16% and the international yield of 7.49%. Pennsylvania residents who get in at Temple show up at a far higher rate than admits from anywhere else, even though their odds of getting in are essentially the same as an out-of-state applicant's. That's a meaningfully different pattern from the admit-rate gap, and it's worth keeping the two separate: Temple is not more selective toward its own state's residents, but its own state's residents are far more likely to actually enroll once admitted.

The same slight out-of-state-over-in-state admit gap held in Fall 2024 (81.75% versus 81.06%), and in-state yield ran roughly two-and-a-half to three times higher than out-of-state yield in both years. This is a consistent pattern, not a one-year anomaly.

A Note on Temple's "State-Related" Status

Temple, like Pitt, is Pennsylvania "state-related" rather than fully public — a distinct legal category with its own funding and governance relationship to the state. Readers comparing Temple to Pitt will reasonably wonder whether that status changes what either school discloses about residency. It doesn't. Temple fills in the same optional Common Data Set residency table that any school, public or private, can complete — there's no special state-related disclosure requirement or exemption at play here, and the completeness of Temple's reporting has nothing to do with its governance category.

What Temple Doesn't Publish

Temple's Fox School of Business and Klein College of Media and Communication are two of the most searched-for names attached to this university, alongside the Tyler School of Art and Architecture. None has a published applicant or admit count. Temple's Common Data Set has no by-college field, and a check of Temple's Institutional Research and Assessment site — including its live Tableau admissions dashboard — found no college-level or major-level breakdown anywhere in it. That dashboard's filter set covers residency, gender, race/ethnicity, state, and country, but no college or major dimension exists. No by-major breakdown is published either, and no enrolled-class composition figure should be read as a stand-in for a college-specific admit rate.

One additional note on sourcing: Temple's own live admissions dashboard shows a set of Fall 2025 figures explicitly flagged by Temple itself as incomplete, alongside an admits figure that would imply a near-100% acceptance rate — clearly not real. The certified Common Data Set filing, not the dashboard, is the source of record for every figure in this article.

What This Means for Your Application

An 86.22% acceptance rate that's essentially the same regardless of residency, combined with in-state yield three times higher than out-of-state, tells a specific story: Temple is not harder to get into if you're from outside Pennsylvania, but Pennsylvania residents who apply are far more likely to actually be the ones who show up. If you're an out-of-state applicant weighing Temple as a safety or target school, the admit-rate math supports that — your odds aren't materially different from an in-state applicant's. What the low out-of-state yield doesn't tell you is anything about your own odds; it reflects what other admitted students collectively chose to do, not a signal about your application specifically.

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