Mount Marty University Acceptance Rate, GPA, and Admission Requirements

Mount Marty University (UNITID 219198, Yankton SD) and Mount Mary University (UNITID 239390, Milwaukee WI) are two distinct Catholic women's-founded institutions with nearly identical names. Mount Marty is the Catholic Benedictine school in South Dakota, founded by the Sisters of the Sacred Heart Monastery; Mount Mary is the School Sisters of Notre Dame institution in Wisconsin, covered separately in this project. On FAFSA, the Common App, and financial aid portals, confirm you're searching "Mount Marty" (South Dakota) and not "Mount Mary" (Wisconsin) before submitting any materials. The application to Mount Marty goes through mountmarty.edu directly; the essay is optional but recommended, and there is no published application fee.

Every freshman and sophomore at Mount Marty participates in the Benedictine Leadership Institute (BLI), which includes travel retreats to the Black Hills of South Dakota and Estes Park, Colorado. These are course-embedded trips framed around the Rule of Saint Benedict and structured around questions like "Who am I?" and "How can I make a difference?" - not recreational field trips. The BLI's four values (awareness of God, community, hospitality, lifelong learning) run through the academic culture and surface in coursework across disciplines. For students drawn to a university where faith formation is structurally integrated rather than voluntary, this is a distinctive feature. For students who are neutral or uncertain about faith integration in the academic calendar, it's worth understanding before enrolling that these retreats are part of the degree experience, not elective.

Mount Marty was the first school in the United States to offer a Bachelor's degree in Nurse Anesthesia (1971), and that history has produced a nursing infrastructure unlike most small Catholic liberal arts universities. Today the program offers BSN, MSN (Family Nurse Practitioner and Psychiatric Mental Health NP concentrations), DNP, and a Doctor of Nurse Anesthesia Practice - with a direct admission pathway from undergraduate BSN directly into the DNAP program, bypassing the need to reapply separately mid-career. This is the only nurse anesthesia master's or doctoral program in South Dakota. The Sioux Falls campus houses the DNAP program. CCNE-accredited throughout. If nursing is your track and you're thinking beyond the BSN from the start, Mount Marty's pipeline is worth mapping before you apply to the undergraduate program - ask specifically how the direct-admission DNAP pathway works and what GPA and clinical thresholds it requires.

Mount Marty's average institutional aid package is over $24,000 per student per year - a figure that routinely brings the net cost below what South Dakota public institutions charge. For students defaulting to USD, SDSU, or NSU because they assume a private Catholic university is unaffordable, the net price calculator at mountmarty.edu is worth running before making that assumption. The university explicitly positions this as its competitive argument in the regional market, and given that roughly 60% of health sciences graduates go on to graduate or professional programs, the undergraduate net-price-to-career-outcome ratio is worth calculating seriously before ruling it out on sticker price alone.