At a Glance
Minnesota admits 78.9% of applicants.
What You'll Actually Pay
See what families at different income levels actually pay after aid.
What families actually pay, by income level
After grants and scholarships. Before loans. Public school prices shown at in-state rates.
Source: College Scorecard / IPEDS, 2024-25
Where the Sticker Price Goes
Based on average need-based grant. Actual cost varies by family income — see chart above.
Shown at in-state rates.
Debt at Graduation
Not reported by this school
receive need-based grant aid
$31,793
average debt at graduation
Minnesota graduates carry an average of $31,793 in debt.
Merit Aid
2,858
students received merit aid
$5,842
average merit award
Getting In
Minnesota admits 78.9% of applicants.
SAT — Middle 50% of those who submitted · 7% of the class submitted
ACT — Middle 50% of those who submitted · 34% of the class submitted
37.7% were in the top 10% of their high school class.
What They Value
Academic
Nonacademic
University of Minnesota Twin Cities gives essays less weight than many schools — academics drive most admissions decisions here. Demonstrated interest is Not Considered here — campus visits and emails to admissions won't affect your odds.
Student Life
36.1% of Minnesota classes have fewer than 20 students.
Share of undergraduate class sections at each size, from CDS Section I-3. More red = more large lectures.
At Minnesota, 36.1% of your classes will have fewer than 20 students.
Class size data reflects all undergraduate sections including labs, seminars, and lectures. Large research universities often have smaller upper-division and graduate-level sections that improve the overall distribution. First and second-year students typically experience larger classes than these averages suggest.
Source: Common Data Set 2025–26, Section I-3 (class sizes)
17:1
student:faculty ratio
Campus Life
From out of state (freshman class)
27%
Live on campus
19.99%
In Greek life
~7%
Greek-life participation from Minnesota FSL (2025) — not reported in Minnesota's 2025–26 Common Data Set.
Who Attends
Racial and ethnic breakdown of enrolled undergraduates, as reported in each school's Common Data Set. "Unknown / Other" includes students who did not report or selected "other."
Minnesota's student body is 54.4% white.
Popular Majors
Will They Graduate?
Minnesota graduates 74.3% of students in 4 years.
Graduating late means paying for extra semesters. The 6-year rate tells you who eventually finishes — the 4-year rate tells you what it actually costs.
Minnesota graduates 74.3% of students in 4 years.
What finishing late actually costs
Based on each school's published cost of attendance. Public school costs shown at in-state rates.
Minnesota
74.3%
4-yr grad rate
Extra year cost: $30,061*
* In-state cost of attendance. Out-of-state students pay significantly more.
Graduation rate data from Common Data Set 2025–26, Fall 2018 cohort (most recent available). 4-year rate = students completing in 4 years or less. 6-year rate = students completing within 6 years.
85.2%
Overall 6-yr rate
80.7%
Pell recipient rate
There's a 4.5 point gap between overall and Pell Grant graduation rates. Worth asking the school about support resources.
Freshman Retention
91.32%
91.32% of first-year students return for sophomore year.
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. 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.
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.
The City
Major city
Minneapolis, MN
Best For
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
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 & 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
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
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 69.01% 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.