What You'll Actually Pay
Price after grants
$6,642 to $27,008 a year for in-state students, depending on income.
College Scorecard 2024 estimate · in-state rates
See the price at your income ↑Sticker price
Full cost before aid: $30,061 a year in-state. Average need-based aid package: $19,235.Aid and debt
$31,793
average debt at graduation
2,858
students got merit aid
about 7% of undergraduates
$5,842
average merit award
Not reported by this school: share receiving need-based grants.
Getting In
Key dates
Test scores
SAT, middle 50% of those who submitted: 1310–1460 · 7% of the class submitted
ACT, middle 50% of those who submitted: 26–32 · 34% of the class submitted
37.7% were in the top 10% of their high school class.
What they value
- Very important
- Course rigor (AP/IB)
- Class rank
- GPA
- Considered
- SAT/ACT scores
- Personal essay
- Recommendations
- Extracurriculars
- Special talent
- Character
- First-gen status
- Where you're from
- In-state residency
- Volunteer work
- Work experience
- Not considered
- Legacy status
- Demonstrated interest
What this means for you
Minnesota rates course rigor as Very Important.
MoreLess
Rigor means AP, IB, and dual enrollment carry real weight — make sure your mix of AP or IB courses is strong.
Minnesota doesn't consider demonstrated interest in admissions at all — visits and follow-up emails won't move the needle here.
Source: Common Data Set 2025–26, Section C7 (admissions factors)
Minnesota just showed you what it values in an application. Use that to write a Why-Minnesota essay that's actually about you — not a template.
Get sourced starting points for your essayStudent Life
36.1% of Minnesota classes have fewer than 20 students.
36.1%
under 20 students
43.4%
20 to 49
20.5%
50 or more
Every class section counts, labs and seminars included; first-year courses tend to be larger. Minnesota CDS 2025–26, I-3.
17:1
student:faculty ratio
Campus life
27%
first-years from out of state
19.99%
live on campus
~7%
in Greek life
Greek-life participation from Minnesota FSL (2025) — not reported in Minnesota's 2025–26 Common Data Set.
Who attends
- White54.4%
- Asian13.5%
- Black11%
- Hispanic6.8%
- Multiracial5.5%
- Unknown / other1.8%
Enrolled undergraduates; international students are counted separately and not included. Minnesota CDS 2025–26, B2.
Popular majors
Will They Graduate?
74.3% of Minnesota students graduate in 4 years.
74.3%
finish in 4 years
Entered fall 2019
85.2%
finish in 6 years
Entered fall 2019
91.32%
return after first year
Finishing late means paying for extra semesters, so the 4-year rate is the one that shows the cost.
Students with Pell Grants
80.7% finish in 6 years, against 85.2% of all students.
A 4.5-point gap: Pell Grant students finish less often than students overall.
City & Culture
Beyond the data — what it's actually like to spend four years in Minneapolis.
The campus sits on both banks of the Mississippi inside Minneapolis, with a second campus across the river in St.
MoreLess
Paul, so this is a flagship embedded in a metropolitan area of roughly three and a half million people rather than a college town. The practical effect is that a light-rail line runs from the middle of campus to downtown, the pro stadiums and the airport, and the internships are in the same city as the lecture halls. The winter is the honest counterweight: it is long, dark and genuinely cold, and it shapes four or five months of the year here in a way it does not further south.
The City
Major city
Minneapolis, MN
Best For
Notable alumni
Notable Alumni
Norman Borlaug
Plant pathologist whose high-yield, disease-resistant wheat is credited with saving hundreds of millions of lives, and who won the 1970 Nobel Peace Prize for it.
Class of 1942
Bob Dylan
Nobel laureate in Literature and the most influential songwriter in American popular music. He enrolled here in 1959 and left the following year, having spent his nights in the Dinkytown coffee houses just off campus where Robert Zimmerman first began calling himself Bob Dylan.
Walter Mondale
42nd Vice President of the United States and a US senator for Minnesota, who took both his undergraduate degree and his law degree here.
Class of 1956
Seymour Cray
Designer of the machines that defined supercomputing for three decades, including the Cray-1, and founder of Cray Research.
Class of 1951
Earl Bakken
Built the first battery-powered wearable pacemaker in 1957, at the request of a University of Minnesota heart surgeon, and founded Medtronic in a Minneapolis garage.
Class of 1948
Lindsay Whalen
Point guard who took the Gophers to the only Final Four in program history in 2004, then won four WNBA titles with the Minnesota Lynx before returning to coach her old team.
Class of 2004
Alumni selected for name recognition and range of fields. Not from the Common Data Set.
Traditions
Traditions
Ski-U-Mah
The university's rallying cry, coined by two Minnesota players in 1884 and pronounced sky-you-mah. It is embedded in the Minnesota Rouser and the other fight songs, and you will hear it at every home game, on merchandise and in the way the place talks about itself.
The Little Brown Jug
A five-gallon water jug that Michigan's team left behind in Minneapolis in 1903 and Minnesota kept, now the oldest trophy in college football. The two schools have played for it ever since, which makes the Michigan game the fixture the calendar is built around.
Gopher hockey
The men's team has won five NCAA championships and has historically been built almost entirely out of players who grew up in Minnesota high school and junior hockey. In a state where the sport is close to a civic religion, a Friday night at 3M Arena at Mariucci is the winter equivalent of a football Saturday.
Weekend escapes from Minneapolis
Weekend Escapes
Within driving distance from Minneapolis
Stillwater and the St. Croix River Valley
40 minutesA 19th-century lumber town on a river gorge marking the Wisconsin border — the standard short escape for hiking, antiques and a boat on the water.
Duluth and the North Shore
2 hours 20 minutesA working port on Lake Superior where the shoreline turns into cliffs, waterfalls and state parks running north toward Canada. It is the trip everyone here makes at least once a year.
Ely and the Boundary Waters
4 hoursA million acres of connected lakes on the Canadian border with no motors allowed — the classic Minnesota canoe trip, and a genuine long-weekend commitment rather than a Saturday.
Getting there and game days
Getting There & Game Days
Nearest airport
Minneapolis-Saint Paul International Airport (MSP)
20 minutes from campus
Flies international — you can start a trip abroad from here.
Pro sports nearby
- Minnesota Vikings NFL
- Minnesota Twins MLB
- Minnesota Timberwolves NBA
- Minnesota Wild NHL
- Minnesota Lynx WNBA
- Minnesota United FC MLS
Internships and jobs nearby
Career Proximity
The Twin Cities carry one of the densest concentrations of large-company headquarters in the country — 17 Fortune 500 companies are based in Minnesota, most of them within half an hour of campus, and the metro ranks first per capita on that measure among the 30 largest US metros. UnitedHealth Group, Target, 3M, Best Buy, U.S. Bancorp and General Mills all recruit here directly, and the medical-device cluster that grew out of Medtronic's founding by a Minnesota engineering graduate is still the region's signature industry. The point for a student is that the internship and the lecture are in the same city: there is no summer relocation and no long-distance recruiting trip.
Top Industries Nearby
Major Employers
- UnitedHealth Group
- Target
- 3M
- Medtronic
- U.S. Bancorp
Minneapolis-St. Paul itself; downtown Minneapolis is about 15 minutes from campus on the Green Line
Who thrives here
Who Thrives Here
Minnesota is a flagship spread across both banks of the Mississippi inside Minneapolis, and the city is the point rather than the backdrop: just 19.99% of undergraduates live in university housing, and a light-rail line runs from the middle of campus to downtown, the stadiums and the airport. The trade is real in both directions — a student who wants a contained campus that organises the weekend for them will find this place diffuse, while a student who would rather hold an internship during term than move away for the summer is in the right city. Academically it runs at research scale, 17 students to a faculty member with 36.1% of sections under 20, and the degrees spread wide instead of concentrating: biological sciences 11.89%, business and marketing 10.79%, computing 10.59%. Two thirds of the entering class are Minnesotans — 66.2% in state against 27.0% from out of it — which is what makes the price gap decisive rather than academic. Run the financial trade-offs early: Minnesota meets 68.93% of demonstrated need, borrowers leave owing $31,793, and 85.2% of students finish within six years against 80.7% of Pell recipients. That gap has narrowed, but the need-met figure is the number to press an admissions officer on.