Dickinson State University

Dickinson State University (DSU) is a public university in Dickinson, North Dakota, United States. It is part of the North Dakota University System. It was founded in 1918 as Dickinson State Normal School and granted full university status in 1987.

Dickinson State was established as a normal school to fill a need for qualified teachers in rural western North Dakota, where fewer than one-quarter of the people working as teachers in the early 1900s were certified as teachers. The university considers June 24, 1918, to be its founding date; this was the first day of classes for the Dickinson Normal School. When first established, the school was tuition-free and operated in the facilities of Dickinson High School. The first campus building, May Hall, was built in 1924.

During World War II, Dickinson State Teachers College was one of 131 colleges and universities nationally that took part in the V-12 Navy College Training Program which offered students a path to a Navy commission.

In 2011 and 2012, Dickinson State attracted negative attention for some of its academic and business practices. In 2011, the university was discovered to have overstated its enrollments by practices such as counting people as students who had merely attended a conference on the campus. This situation resulted in the dismissal of the university president, Richard J. McCallum.

A North Dakota University System audit report released in February 2012 found that the school had relaxed standards and waived some requirements to increase enrollment of foreign students and had, over a period of several years, awarded degrees to 584 foreign students who had not completed the required coursework. The report was a followup of an earlier meeting between Dickinson officials and the Higher Learning Commission at which the DSU officials "realized they may have an issue with one or more of the HLC's requirements surrounding academic agreements". Most of the university's foreign students came from China, where the university employed recruiting agents who falsely claimed to be university employees and sometimes misrepresented the university's programs. News media accounts described the audit report as depicting Dickinson State as a degree mill. The audit had been requested by the university's president, Douglas Coston, who took office as Interim President in August 2011, after some university international agreements were found not to conform with requirements of the North Dakota State Board of Higher Education and the Higher Learning Commission. On the day of the audit release, the Dean of Education committed suicide. Six months later, in July, Dickinson's regional accreditor, the Higher Learning Commission (HLC), placed the university "on notice," requiring the university provide detailed responses to concerns found in the accreditor's recent site visit. That status was removed three years later when HLC renewed DSU's accreditation for ten years.

In 2023, the university eliminated seven degree programs to address ongoing financial challenges. This included firing tenured faculty in those programs. The university's decisions and actions were met with protests from faculty and others. University leaders also reorganized parts of the university and eliminated other positions. The following year, the university changed its academic policies to increase class sizes and require faculty to teach more students. In response, all seven faculty members in the university's nursing program resigned, protesting that the new policies are unworkable in their program. The university was already under scrutiny by the program's accreditor, the Accreditation Commission for Education in Nursing, and the state's board of nursing did not approve president Eaton's plan for hiring new faculty. He subsequently announced his plans to resign and Dickinson's nursing program partnered with Mayville State University to continue Dickinson's nursing program.

Dickinson State offers bachelor's degrees in more than 75 fields of study through 10 academic departments. The university also offers certificates and associate degrees. However, it specializes in business management, teacher education, and nursing. Most students attending DSU are business management majors although education (both elementary and secondary), nursing, natural science, and agriculture majors constitute significant areas of study. There is also opportunity for pre-professional study and vocational training in selected areas.

Student programs are based on a core of General Education courses, including fine arts, humanities, natural sciences, mathematics, and the social and behavioral sciences. Dickinson State University students are encouraged to complete their general education requirements by the end of the sophomore year. Students are then free as juniors and seniors to explore a major field of study.