Undergraduate enrollment at Minnesota’s public two-year schools increased more than 10 percent from 2024 to 2025, according to data from the National Student Clearinghouse (NSC).
While the latest two-year sector enrollment data is about two percent lower than it was spring 2020 — community colleges were hit especially hard by COVID-19 — more Minnesotans continue choosing public two-year options over public four-year institutions.
For 2025, undergraduate enrollment numbers for public two-year colleges came in at 103,425, a 10.4 percent increase (+9,744 students) from the previous year. Public four-year enrollment tallied 89,905, a 3.7 percent increase (+3,188 students) over the same period.
Nationally, community colleges saw the largest undergraduate growth of any sector at 5.4 percent, or 288,000 students, over the previous spring.
Public two-year schools that focus on vocational and trade programs are driving much of this growth, the NSC reports. Enrollment at these institutions has grown by almost 20 percent since spring 2020.
“This is great news for community colleges, and especially for those with strong vocational programs,” says Doug Shapiro, Executive Director of the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center. “Four-year colleges can also feel good about higher numbers of undergraduates this spring, but their growth rates are slower.” Nationally, enrollment at public four-year institutions ticked up 2.5 percent from 2024 to 2025 and has increased 2.1 percent since 2020.
What is driving the growth?
One reason may be how Americans view higher education. Gallup polls over the last decade have shown a decline in support of colleges and universities, and a new poll shows this lack of confidence isn’t getting any better, reports The 74.
Thirty-eight percent of U.S. adults say they have “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in higher education, compared with 42 percent last year. Thirty-seven percent expressed “some” confidence, and 25 percent expressed “very little” or no confidence. Gallup’s first poll measuring confidence in higher education in 2015 found 57 percent of respondents expressing a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in the institution.
When broken down by party affiliation, the long-term decline in confidence has been steepest among Republicans, but the most recent drop was driven largely by Democrats.
Sentiments behind these numbers, according to Gallup, generally focused on three themes: perceived political agendas on college campuses (31 percent), doubts over whether the high cost is worth it (30 percent), and colleges not preparing students well for the workforce (25 percent).
Students say they feel those campus dynamics firsthand. In a first-of-its-kind study I previously wrote about here, 88 percent of surveyed undergraduates admitted to pretending to be more liberal than they actually are to make life easier. More than 80 percent said they had submitted classwork that misrepresented their views to align with professors.
Pertaining to cost, as I previously wrote here, associate degrees and certificates carry significantly less debt than bachelor’s degrees. Not all bachelor’s degrees lead to higher lifetime earnings, and given the higher per-year debt they carry, the value of such a degree isn’t as clear-cut as it once was.
Even so, stigma about skilled trade jobs and how they compare to white-collar work still exists, and it risks deterring young people from career paths that interest them and that Minnesota’s economy will need filled in the coming years.
That’s why American Experiment’s Great Jobs Without a Four-Year Degree initiative worked so hard to inform young Minnesotans about the satisfying and lucrative opportunities in the trades and other fields. The initiative brought attention to the wide range of careers that form the backbone of Minnesota’s economy, along with the technical education, apprenticeships, and community college programs available to pursue them.
For many students, a four-year degree can still be the right choice. But these enrollment numbers suggest that more people are rethinking what higher education looks like. When students understand their full range of options, they are far more likely to choose a career path that actually fits them.
