Even as the city of Moorhead has grown, Minnesota State University Moorhead has shrunk.

More than 45,000 people live in Moorhead, a 17% increase over the past decade and a 40% increase since 2000. At the same time, the university's enrollment has steadily decreased for two decades. In 2007, more than 7,500 students were enrolled at MSUM. For the most recent fall semester, that number dipped below 4,400 students, a decrease of more than 40%.

But a new program promising four years of free tuition for eligible local high school students aims to help reverse the university's contraction as well as further knit together the university and the community.

The new Moorhead Scholars program, which was announced late this year and which begins in fall 2025, will offer free tuition to Moorhead High School students who graduate with a 3.0 grade-point average. The program is different from the state's North Star Promise program because it's merit-based, not needs-based; the North Star Promise free-tuition program is only for Minnesota residents with a family income of less than $80,000. The goal will be to double the number of Moorhead High School students who attend college at MSUM.

About 40 to 50 Moorhead High School students annually head to MSUM, but many head next door to Fargo for North Dakota State University, whose enrollment is nearly three times that of MSUM.

"That's not enough," said Tim Downs, the president of MSUM. "A lot of them are going across the river. They're in the wrong state! If you leave a region from high school to college, quite often you never come back. And then they're gone."

The program, exclusively for Moorhead High School graduates, will be paid for with a combination of federal, state and institutional grants and scholarships for MSUM. Depending on funding and the success of the program, university administrators have discussed the possibility of expanding it in the future to other public high schools in the area.

The program builds on the significant amount of Moorhead momentum the past couple of years.

The city is in the midst of blowing up its struggling downtown and starting over. In the 1970s, the city changed its downtown street grid and existing businesses to build Moorhead Center Mall, but since anchor tenant Herberger's closed in 2018, the mall has been on life support.

A half-cent sales tax voters overwhelmingly approved in 2022 is spurring a $300 million-plus re-envisioning of downtown. A library and community center will anchor the new downtown with 155,000 square feet of civic space, and private developers hope to bring more than 1,000 housing units and more than 100 dining and retail spaces there in the coming years.

The city hopes the library and community center, which is being built now, will open in 2026, and a project of mixed-use buildings on 3 acres aims to open next year.

Meanwhile, a Washington, D.C.-based energy company recently announced plans to open a sustainable aviation fuel plant in Moorhead, which will convert agriculture and timber waste into jet fuel. The plant, expected to start production in 2030, will bring 650 jobs to the area.

And in 2019 Moorhead voters overwhelmingly approved a $110 million building bond for a new career academy and new high school. After some COVID-related delays, phase one of the new high school has wrapped up, and the project will be fully completed before the 2026-27 school year.

"People have underestimated Moorhead for a really, really long time, and we've taken that with a grain of salt," said Mayor Shelly Carlson. "We're just going to prove them wrong."

City leaders hope a growing university can keep more students in the area, which would help with workforce shortages. The university has responded to localized workforce demands, such as starting a cybersecurity program when business leaders expressed the growing need in that field.

While Minnesotans may overlook Moorhead itself — it's Minnesota's 23rd-largest city, between Mankato and Cottage Grove — the metropolitan area carries regional heft. The Fargo-Moorhead metropolitan area is, at a quarter-million people, roughly the same size as the metropolitan areas of Rochester and Duluth.

"There's this different vision that's come to town, and people are noticing that," said Brandon Lunak, the superintendent of Moorhead public schools.

City leaders say more cooperation between the university and the high school, which are virtually next-door neighbors, just makes sense. The edge of the university campus is right across Main Avenue from the high school.

Administrators see the tuition program as one more step in blurring the lines between K-12 education and higher education.

MSUM already has a postsecondary enrollment options agreement with Moorhead High School, where high school students can take classes for college credits. So do Concordia College and Minnesota State Community and Technical College Moorhead.

The high school's program for special-needs students ages 18 to 22 is already at MSUM. And there have been discussions about sharing facilities between the university and the high school.

MSUM leaders see this free-tuition program as one step in transforming the university. It was founded as a teachers school in the 1880s, and today is a traditional liberal arts university with respected film and animation programs as well as a well-known planetarium and oceanarium marine laboratory.

University administrators point to encouraging signs for growth, with an uptick in new enrollees in fall 2024. The number of new students accounts for nearly 40% of the entire student body at MSUM, which administrators hope indicates a rise in total future enrollment.

Still, the nearly 1,700 new enrollees for fall semester 2024 is significantly fewer than a decade before.

"We're fundamentally repositioning how the university is viewed. We want to be relevant, we want to compete, we want to be doing things that are seen as bold," said Jason Trainer, vice president for strategic enrollment management at MSUM. "We're in this really booming region that's grown, and we just haven't seen that growth. It made sense to start by looking in our backyard."