Minot 1 - EdTribune ND - North Dakota Education Data

6,336 Students Below the Trend Line

Thu, 09 Apr 2026 12:00:00 GMT

Between 2008 and 2019, North Dakota added an average of 1,526 students a year. The Bakken oil boom filled western classrooms. Fargo's suburbs pushed east. Enrollment climbed from 94,052 to 110,842, a 17.9% surge that made it one of the fastest-growing states in the country.

If that pace had held, North Dakota would have 122,701 students today. It has 116,365. The 6,336-student shortfall works out to roughly $71.9 million in annual per-pupil funding at the state's current rate of $11,349 per student. And the gap is getting worse fast: it grew by nearly 2,000 students in a single year, from 4,351 in 2025 to 6,336 in 2026.

A gap that did not exist in 2020

The projection is simple: a linear fit to the 12 years from 2008 through 2019, which explains 95.6% of the variation. The trend line added roughly 1,753 students per year.

Through 2020, North Dakota was actually ahead of that line — 672 more students than projected, carried by a final pre-pandemic surge of 2,016. Then 2021 hit. The pandemic wiped out 813 students in a single year, and the state never got back on track.

The recovery was real but not enough. North Dakota bounced back with gains of 1,813 (2022) and 1,527 (2023) — numbers that would have been healthy in any prior decade. But closing the gap required 1,753 per year just to stay level. By 2024, annual growth had slowed to 382. By 2026, it turned negative.

The cumulative toll is steeper than any single year suggests. Over six years since the pandemic, North Dakota has fallen short of its trend line by a combined 19,901 student-years — an aggregate funding gap of roughly $225.9 million.

The deceleration is visible year by year

From 2009 through 2020, North Dakota posted gains in 11 of 12 years. The average was 1,526 per year, powered by a boom-era peak of 3,414 in 2013 when Bakken drilling was at its most intense. Since 2020, the average has fallen to 584 per year, and the most recent year turned negative for only the second time since 2009.

This is not a sudden collapse. After the pandemic dip of -813 in 2021, gains recovered to 1,813 and then 1,527 before dropping sharply: 382, 831, -233. A steady fade, with the one uptick in 2025 (+831) not nearly enough to reverse the broader direction.

Five districts account for most of the shortfall

The 6,336-student statewide gap is not spread evenly. Of 161 districts with enough history to model, 93 sit below their pre-COVID projection and 67 sit above. But the shortfall piles up at the top.

Minot 1^↗ is the single largest contributor, running 1,348 students below its projected enrollment. Minot's pre-COVID trend added 118 students per year. The district peaked at 7,723 in 2015 and has since fallen to 7,243, a decline that began well before the pandemic but accelerated after it. Bismarck 1^↗ trails its projection by 952 students, and Fargo 1^↗ by 891. Dickinson 1^↗, another oil-patch district, falls 533 short. Even West Fargo 6^↗, the state's fastest-growing district for 18 consecutive years, sits 520 below where its pre-COVID trajectory projected it would be.

Those five districts alone account for 4,244 of the 6,336-student statewide gap, 67.0% of the total.

On the other side of the ledger, Mandan 1^↗ (+135) and Devils Lake 1^↗ (+142) are among the few mid-sized districts outpacing their pre-COVID trend. Several small rural districts, including Yellowstone 14 (+154) and Carrington 49 (+121), also beat their projections, though in some cases the "projection" reflected a pre-COVID decline that has since reversed.

Fewer entering than exiting

Beneath the topline gap sits a structural warning. In 2026, North Dakota enrolled 8,361 kindergartners and 8,400 twelfth graders. More students are walking out the door with diplomas than walking in for the first time.

Kindergarten peaked at 9,620 in 2020 and has dropped 13.1% since. Grade 12 has climbed steadily as larger cohorts born during the early Bakken boom work through the system. The crossover happened for the first time since 2011, and the arithmetic is unforgiving: when the entering class is smaller than the graduating one, total enrollment shrinks unless in-migration fills the gap.

North Dakota's birth count has tracked a similar curve. Annual births peaked above 11,000 during 2014-2016, when oil activity drew young families to the state, and have since fallen to roughly 9,592 in 2024. Those smaller cohorts are now arriving at kindergarten.

Three forces behind the gap

No single factor explains the 6,336-student shortfall, but three stand out.

The most direct is the Bakken production cycle. North Dakota's enrollment boom tracked the oil boom almost year for year. The sharpest enrollment gains (3,414 in 2013, 2,622 in 2015) came at peak drilling activity. Now the formation is maturing. Rig counts dropped from about 35 in January 2025 to roughly 30 by mid-year, and Continental Resources, the state's second-largest producer, announced it would halt all North Dakota drilling for the first time in 30 years, citing breakeven prices of $50 to $65 per barrel in a lower-price environment.

"There's a lot of spare capacity on that pipe. It's flowing pretty empty." — Gage Dwan, energy analyst at East Daley Analytics, on the Dakota Access Pipeline's declining flows

Fewer drilling jobs means fewer transient families in western North Dakota, and that hits enrollment directly in districts like Dickinson, Stanley, and Minot.

The second force is the homeschool exodus. North Dakota's homeschool enrollment climbed to 5,953 students in 2025-26, a 73% increase since 2019-20 and a 19% jump in the most recent year alone. That roughly 2,500-student increase since the pandemic accounts for about 40% of the statewide gap, though the relationship is not one-to-one: some homeschool families would not have enrolled in public schools regardless.

The third is falling birth rates, a trend that is national in scope. North Dakota's total population continues to grow, reaching 799,358 in 2025 on the strength of in-migration. But growth is concentrated among working-age adults and retirees, not school-age children. The share of residents 65 and older has climbed to 17.3%, while kindergarten classes shrink.

The gap matters because it compounds

A 6,336-student shortfall is not just an abstract comparison to a trend line. At $11,349 per pupil, it means $71.9 million in annual state foundation aid that districts would have received under the pre-COVID trajectory. Over six years, the cumulative shortfall is nearly 20,000 student-years — $225.9 million in foregone funding.

That fiscal pressure stacks on top of another post-pandemic reality. Chronic absenteeism in North Dakota rose from 12% to 20% of students between 2019 and 2024, and the state received $474 million in pandemic relief at about $4,200 per student, well above the national average of $3,700. That federal money has expired. The students it was meant to recover have not all returned.

No North Dakota district has fully recovered to 2019 achievement levels in either math or reading, according to the Education Recovery Scorecard. The state ranks 12th nationally in math recovery but 33rd in reading. Fewer students and weaker outcomes make every per-pupil dollar count more.

$71.9 million and counting

The 6,336-student gap is not an abstract comparison to a line on a chart. It is $71.9 million in annual per-pupil funding that districts would have received under the pre-COVID trajectory. Minot, which accounts for 1,348 of those missing students, has already posted a $401,265 budget deficit for 2025-26. Jamestown, 269 students below its 2008 level, is studying which of its elementary buildings to close before the general fund runs out in 2029-30.

Governor Armstrong's veto of the ESA/voucher bill kept a potential new enrollment drain off the table. The charter school law passed the same session could introduce another. But neither policy created the gap. The gap is 6,336 families who were supposed to show up, by the standards of the state's own growth trajectory, and did not.

Detailed code that reproduces the analysis and figures in this article is available exclusively to EdTribune subscribers.

89% to 82%: North Dakota's Graduation Rate Collapse

Thu, 26 Mar 2026 12:00:00 GMT

North Dakota graduated 89.0% of its high school seniors in 2020. Four years later, that number is 82.4%. The state has not posted a single year of improvement since.

A caveat: the 2020 rate was likely boosted by pandemic-era grading flexibility. But even against the pre-pandemic average of 87-88%, the 2024 rate is 5 points lower. This is not a return to normal.

That 6.6-point drop translates to 1,527 students in the 2024 cohort who did not earn a diploma within four years -- nearly double the 826 non-graduates in 2020. (Some may still graduate in a fifth or sixth year; this is the four-year rate.) The slide came in stages: 2.0 points in 2021, 2.7 in 2022, 1.6 in 2023, and 0.3 in 2024. The pace has slowed, but the direction hasn't changed.

A Bigger Cohort, Not Enough Graduates

The arithmetic is straightforward. North Dakota's four-year graduation cohort grew from 7,486 students in 2020 to 8,681 in 2024 -- a 16.0% increase. These are the children of the Bakken oil boom: families who moved to western North Dakota in the early 2010s brought young kids who are now finishing high school. Research from Resources for the Future found that elementary enrollment in core oil-producing districts surged 20% above historic highs by 2015, with kindergarten expanding 32% above 1990s levels. Those kindergartners are now seniors.

The number of graduates also grew, from 6,660 to 7,154, up 494 students. But the cohort grew by 1,195. North Dakota is producing more graduates than ever in raw terms while falling behind on the share it gets across the finish line.

The cohort has also diversified sharply. Students of color made up 15.1% of the graduating class in 2013. By 2024, that share hit 26.0%. Black students in the cohort nearly tripled, from 198 to 579. Hispanic students grew from 150 to 542. North Dakota's foreign-born population grew by 123% between 2010 and 2022, the largest proportional increase of any U.S. state, pulled by labor demand in oil, manufacturing, and healthcare. Many of those arrivals were of childbearing age. Their children are now reaching the graduation pipeline.

Nobody Is Spared

Every demographic subgroup has declined since 2020. Not most. All of them.

Black students took the steepest hit: 82.2% to 70.8%, down 11.4 points. English learners fell 14.0 points, from 83.3% to 69.3%, though the EL cohort is small (270 students in 2024), making that rate jumpy. Native American students, already the lowest-performing group, dropped from 72.7% to 63.4%. Economically disadvantaged students fell from 76.9% to 67.6%. Even white students, at 92.2% in 2020, have slid to 87.5%.

The gender gap follows the same pattern. Male graduation rates fell from 87.6% to 81.0%; female rates from 90.4% to 83.9%. The gap widened from 2.8 points in 2020 to 5.2 in 2022, then narrowed back to 2.9 by 2024. Both are falling roughly in lockstep.

The Equity Gap That Closed Is Opening Again

Between 2013 and 2020, North Dakota made meaningful progress in narrowing the graduation gap between white and Native American students. The gap shrank from 26.0 percentage points to 19.5, a compression of 6.5 points over seven years. Native American rates climbed from 64.3% to 72.7% while white rates also rose, but more slowly.

That progress is gone. By 2024, the gap had widened back to 24.1 percentage points. Native American students lost 9.3 points from their 2020 peak while white students lost 4.7. Nearly half a decade's worth of gains erased in four years.

Native American students make up 10.8% of the 2024 graduation cohort, the largest minority group. The 63.4% graduation rate means roughly one in three Native American students in the cohort did not graduate within four years. At Belcourt^↗, which serves the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa, the graduation rate fell from 75.2% to 68.0%.

What Is Behind the Numbers

Three forces are pushing in the same direction.

First, the cohort surge. A system built to graduate roughly 7,500 students a year is now processing over 8,600. If staffing, counselors, and intervention capacity did not grow to match, the rate would fall even if nothing else changed.

Second, chronic absenteeism, which doubled statewide after the pandemic. North Dakota's rate rose from 11% in 2019-20 to 22% in 2021-22, according to Valley News Live reporting on state data. Joe Kolosky, director of approval and opportunity at the North Dakota Department of Public Instruction, attributed the trend partly to the pandemic:

"COVID-19 did have a dramatic impact on attendance rates in the state and the country." — Valley News Live, July 2023

West Fargo's chronic absenteeism rate tripled from 5% to 16% between 2019-20 and 2022-23. Fargo's went from 17% to 25%. Students who miss more than 10% of school days accumulate credit deficits that make on-time graduation harder to achieve.

Third, compositional change. A growing share of the cohort comes from groups that have historically graduated at lower rates: Native American, Black, Hispanic, economically disadvantaged, and English learner students. That is not a statement about those students -- it reflects accumulated barriers, from housing instability to language access to chronically underfunded tribal schools. When the share of students facing those barriers grows, the aggregate rate drops even if each group's rate holds steady. In North Dakota, each group's rate is also falling, which compounds the effect.

The Minot Problem

Minot^↗ stands out. Its graduation rate dropped from 83.4% in 2020 to 69.9% in 2024, a 13.5 percentage point decline that is more than double the state average. The 559-student cohort is the fifth largest in the state.

The explanation is partly structural. Minot's Souris River Campus Alternative High School, which serves students who have struggled in traditional settings, graduated just 7.5% of its 120-student cohort in 2024. A separate virtual academy graduated one of its 12 students. Both programs are counted in Minot's district-level rate. Magic City Campus, the traditional high school, graduated at 89.2% -- roughly where it has always been.

The same pattern shows up across the largest districts. West Fargo^↗ fell from 91.5% to 79.9%, an 11.6-point drop, while rapidly adding students and alternative programs. Fargo^↗ dropped from 87.0% to 80.0%. Bismarck^↗ went from 89.8% to 84.5%. Of the 12 districts with cohorts of 100 or more, only Mandan^↗ improved, up 2.9 points.

The Alternative School Complication

Alternative and virtual high schools exist for a reason: they keep students who would otherwise leave the system entirely. But their low graduation rates drag down district-level numbers.

"Students...have lost hope for a positive future." — Principal Joe Kalvoda, on students in alternative programs, Buffalo's Fire

Statewide, alternative and virtual programs enrolled roughly 1,238 students in the 2024 graduation cohort -- about 14.3% of the total -- and graduated 59.7% of them. Strip those programs out and the "traditional" graduation rate was 86.2% in 2024, down from 92.3% in 2020. Still falling, by 6.1 points over four years. Alternative school growth explains some of the headline decline, but not most of it.

What to Watch

The decline has not bottomed out. The 2024 rate of 82.4% is the lowest on record in the 12-year dataset. Grade 9 enrollment, which peaked at 9,232 in 2023, means large cohorts will keep arriving at the finish line for several more years.

North Dakota added 1,195 students to its graduation pipeline in four years. It needs proportionally more counselors, credit recovery programs, and alternative pathways to keep up. The $4.8 million Stronger Connections grant targeting chronic absenteeism is a start. But 82.4% means 1,527 students a year entering adulthood without a diploma. For a state with fewer than 780,000 residents, that is a workforce pipeline problem that compounds annually.

Detailed code that reproduces the analysis and figures in this article is available exclusively to EdTribune subscribers.

North Dakota's 16-Year Growth Era Ends

Thu, 05 Mar 2026 12:00:00 GMT

For 16 of the past 17 years, North Dakota added students. The Bakken oil boom pulled families into the western prairie. Fargo's suburbs sprawled east. The state's enrollment climbed from 93,406 in 2009 to 116,598 in 2025, a 24.8% surge that made North Dakota one of the fastest-growing states for public school enrollment in the country.

In 2026, that streak broke. The state lost 233 students, dropping to 116,365. The only other decline since 2009 came in the pandemic year of 2021. This one has no pandemic to blame.

The deceleration was years in the making

The 2026 decline didn't arrive overnight. Annual gains have been shrinking since 2020, when the state added 2,016 students. By 2024 that was down to 382. A brief uptick to 831 in 2025 gave way to the -233 of 2026.

The year-over-year chart tells the story: the green bars shrank for four straight years before turning red.

Had the pre-pandemic growth rate continued, the 2008-2019 trend line projected 122,701 students by 2026. The actual figure falls 6,336 below that mark. The gap has widened every year since 2021, growing from roughly 3,100 to more than 6,300 in five years.

The state added an average of 1,753 students per year from 2008 through 2019. Over the past three years, the average has been 327.

Fewer kindergartners than seniors

Beneath the topline number sits a structural warning. In 2026, North Dakota enrolled 8,361 kindergartners and 8,400 twelfth-graders. First time since 2010 that the entering class was smaller than the exiting one.

Kindergarten peaked at 9,620 in 2020 and has fallen 13.1% since, shedding 1,259 students in six years. Grade 12, meanwhile, has climbed steadily as the larger cohorts born during the early Bakken boom move through the system. North Dakota is now graduating more students than it enrolls at the front door.

This is not a one-year blip. The state's birth count fell from over 11,000 annually during 2014-2016 to 9,592 in 2024. Those smaller birth cohorts are arriving at kindergarten while the larger mid-2000s cohorts age out of high school. The arithmetic runs one way.

The oil variable

North Dakota's enrollment boom tracked the Bakken formation's production arc. The biggest enrollment gains came in 2013 (+3,414) and 2015 (+2,622), when drilling activity peaked in the western counties. McKenzie County 1, the district at the center of the oil patch, grew from 533 students in 2008 to 2,371 in 2026 -- a 345% increase.

But the Bakken is maturing. Rig counts dropped from about 35 in January 2025 to roughly 30 by mid-year, and Continental Resources, the state's second-largest oil producer, announced in January 2026 that it would stop drilling in North Dakota for the first time in 30 years.

"Bakken oil production signals slowdown as key pipeline flows decline." — World Oil, September 2025

Population data complicates the story. North Dakota's total population grew 0.8% in 2024-2025, reaching 799,358, boosted by international migration that added 2,810 residents. The state is still growing. Its schools are not. That gap points to an aging demographic profile: residents 65 and older now make up 17.3% of the state's population, while the school-age share shrinks.

Two North Dakotas in the same data

The statewide -233 hides a sharp geographic split. Of 165 districts, 95 lost students in 2026 while 66 gained. The two groups tell very different stories about where the state is headed.

Williston Basin 7^↗ led the state with a gain of 245 students, reaching 5,584. West Fargo 6^↗ added 216 to reach 13,211. On the other side, Minot 1^↗ lost 276 students, its steepest one-year decline in the dataset, falling to 7,243. Minot peaked at 7,723 in 2015 and has now lost 480 students, a 6.2% decline over 11 years. Grand Forks 1^↗ dropped 120, Fargo 1^↗ lost 116, and Jamestown 1^↗ fell by 94.

The five biggest losers account for 678 of the 1,454 total students lost by declining districts -- 46.6% of the damage concentrated in five places.

West Fargo has been the breakout. Its enrollment has grown 113.8% since 2008, from 6,179 to 13,211 -- adding 7,032 students. It passed Fargo in 2021 and is now closing in on Bismarck 1^↗ (13,677) for the title of North Dakota's largest district. An enrollment consultant told InForum that even West Fargo's growth may be cooling, noting that "one of the most notable changes that can affect enrollment is decreasing birth rate and smaller kindergarten classes."

Bismarck, which grew steadily for over a decade, peaked at 13,749 in 2025 and lost 72 students in 2026. Fargo peaked at 11,382 in 2020 and has since dropped 217, prompting the district to propose boundary changes at northside elementary schools.

23 districts at their lowest point

Beyond the big cities, 23 districts hit their all-time enrollment low in 2026. At the same time, 25 are at an all-time high. The state contains districts that have never been bigger alongside districts that have never been smaller.

Jamestown 1^↗ is the largest district at a record low, with 1,925 students, down 28% since 2003-04 according to the Jamestown Sun. Superintendent Rob Lech told the paper:

"Not doing anything isn't really an option. When you see from your last facility change a 28% decrease in enrollment, we have to operationally do something different."

The district is weighing whether to close one, two, or three elementary buildings. Under current operations, its general fund is projected to run dry by 2029-2030.

Meanwhile, the 29 districts that have disappeared since 2008 (from 194 to 165) represent rural consolidation already underway. Nine districts in the current 2026 data have fewer than 50 students. The smallest, Selfridge 8, enrolls eight.

A graduation rate under pressure

Graduation data, available through 2023-2024, adds another dimension. The statewide four-year rate fell from 89.0% in 2020 to 82.4% in 2024, a 6.6-point drop in four years. Part of this is mechanical: a larger cohort (8,681 in 2024 vs. 7,486 in 2020) includes a broader cross-section of students. But the decline is steep by any measure.

The gap between white and Native American graduation rates stands at 24.1 percentage points: 87.5% vs. 63.4% in 2024. That gap had narrowed from 2013 to 2020 as the Native American rate climbed from 64.3% to 72.7%. It has since reversed. The Native American rate fell nearly 10 points in four years, while the white rate dropped from 92.2% to 87.5%.

The school choice frontier

North Dakota's policy landscape is also shifting. In April 2025, Governor Kelly Armstrong signed SB 2241, making North Dakota the 47th state to authorize public charter schools. None are operating yet -- the Department of Public Instruction is still writing administrative rules -- but the law introduces a new variable.

Armstrong separately vetoed HB 1540, an education savings account bill, calling it a plan that "falls short of truly expanding choice" and would "cater to only a small segment of North Dakota's student population." Per-pupil funding stands at $11,349 for 2024-25, with a 2% annual increase in the governor's budget.

For districts already losing students, the math is punishing. Each student who leaves takes $11,349 in state funding. The building, the heating bill, and most of the staff stay behind.

The arithmetic ahead

The 2027 kindergarten cohort was born in 2021, the year North Dakota's births crossed below 10,000 for the first time since the Bakken boom began. That class will enter schools smaller than the one it replaces. The year after that will be smaller still.

Meanwhile, the 12th graders walking out of Bismarck, Fargo, and Minot high schools in June 2026 belong to the largest graduating classes the state has ever produced. Each one takes $11,349 in per-pupil funding with them. Each unfilled kindergarten seat sends nothing back. For Jamestown, where the superintendent is already weighing which elementary buildings to close, and for the nine districts that enrolled fewer than 50 students this year, the gap between those two numbers is not an abstraction. It is next year's budget.

Detailed code that reproduces the analysis and figures in this article is available exclusively to EdTribune subscribers.