College enrollment up across the board in Bemidji, president credits new policies

Bemidji State University in conjunction with Northland Technical College this week announced a total enrollment increase of more than 5,000 students across the two institutions.

The Minnesota State system of colleges and universities data shows BSU enrollment increased by 4.2 percent over the last year with 4,076 students enrolled. But NTC saw a gain of 8.5 percent with 983 students in the same timeframe. 

BSU and NTC President John Hoffman said new policies such as the American Indian Scholars Program and the North Star Promise for low-income households helped drive the uptick. 

“This is public policy that guarantees that tuition is fully covered for every student coming from a family earning less than $80,000 a year,” he said. “Those 444 students, just to put that in context, for us at Bemidji State and NTC, we serve about 3.1 percent of all of the students in Minnesota state, but we received almost 3.8 percent of the North Star Awards.”  

 President Hoffman said other factors also helped. 

“I would be remiss if I did not give props to the enrollment growth to our people,” he said. “Our faculty have worked remarkably hard over the last two years. They’ve been difficult years for our institution, but they are stepping up.” 

BSU and NTC vice president for enrollment management Ben Hoffman, said numbers are up across the board among new, transfer and graduate students. Additionally, following national and regional trends both institutions are seeing more females than males enroll. At NTC this trend is being fueled by a booming nursing program and a new cosmetology program. 

“At BSU, we have seen increases in our nursing program, our business programs, our biology programs, really, we’ve seen some nice increases across the board, in our academic programs,” Ben Hoffman said. “So, it’s encouraging that it’s a wide swath of students that are attending in a bunch of different disciplines.” 

Another area both institutions have improved is in public awareness.     

“We’ve just really increased our outreach to the region,” he said. “We’ve tried to be more present within the schools, build community partnerships, build industry partnerships, and we’re seeing that bear fruit.”

Enrollment at BSU is the university’s highest fall census-day headcount since 2021. It represents the first increase in fall enrollment from the previous year since 2017.  

For NTC, enrollment has not been higher since 2018. It has seen enrollment explode by more than 35 percent in just the last two years. 

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