ST. PAUL (Minnesota Reformer) — Around 85% of Minnesota students who entered high school in the fall of 2021 graduated within four years, according to data released Friday from the Minnesota Department of Education. It’s a slight increase from the 84.2% graduation rate the year before, following the trend over the past several years of rates staying about the same or increasing slightly.
Minnesota Commissioner of Education Willie Jett said in a press briefing that 2025 had the highest Minnesota graduation rate ever recorded. Jett said that there’s been an overall increase in educational engagement, and students reporting that their teachers care about them, possibly contributing to more students graduating on time. Jett also credited investments in public schools from the robust education budget passed by the DFL trifecta in 2023.
Graduation rates continued to differ widely across racial groups and economic strata, though all racial and ethnic categories saw improvements in 2025. The biggest jump was among Native students, who graduated at a rate of 67.6% in 2025 compared to about 63% in 2024.
Seventy-six percent of students whose families make less than 185% of the federal poverty line graduated in 2025, a slight increase from 74.4% in 2024 but still far below the state average.
The trend in graduation rates, which haven’t changed much over the past decade, is sunnier than the state’s standardized test scores, which dropped precipitously after the COVID-19 pandemic led schools to close or offer only virtual classes and have stagnated since then.
Fewer than half of Minnesota public school students met grade-level expectations on math and reading exams given in May 2025 — 43% in math and 48% in reading.
Gov. Tim Walz, a former teacher, made graduation rates a focus of his education policy early in his first term, with the goal of reducing the number of high school dropouts to zero. Some critics said it was a deflection from Minnesota’s increasingly mediocre test score results. Over the course of Walz’s two-term tenure, Minnesota’s graduation rate only increased about 1 percentage point, from 83.7% in 2019.
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