Brown College (Minnesota)

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Brown College (Minnesota) was a private for-profit college with campuses in Mendota Heights and Brooklyn Center, near Minneapolis. It operated from 1946 to 2017. In March 2014, it merged with Sanford-Brown College to form Sanford-Brown College. The Minnesota campuses shared leadership.

The school was part of Career Education Corporation (CEC), a large for-profit education company. It offered programs in Broadcasting, Game Design, Visual Communications, Network, Business Management, Medical Assisting, and Criminal Justice. Classes ran in five-week modules year-round, with breaks in July and December.

In May 2015, CEC announced the closure of all remaining Sanford-Brown schools. Brown College began in 1946 as the American Institute of the Air, founded by Richard and Helen Brown. It changed names over time: to Brown Institute in 1954 and to Brown College in 2001. The founders retired in 1978 but stayed involved until 1994.

Brown College moved locations several times. It started on East Lake Street in Minneapolis, then moved to a new Minneapolis facility in 1986. It relocated to Mendota Heights in 1997, and opened a Brooklyn Center campus in 2001. In 1999, Career Education Corporation partnered with Le Cordon Bleu, and Brown was the first North American college to include a Le Cordon Bleu Culinary Program. Le Cordon Bleu became a separate entity in 2005.

The college canceled the Electronics Technology program in 2003. In 2011, the college stopped admitting new students to Game Design & Development.

Brown College was nationally accredited by ACCSCT and ACICS, but it did not have regional accreditation. This meant credits from Brown were not always accepted by regionally accredited schools.

The Mendota Heights campus closed in January 2017, and the Brooklyn Center campus closed in April 2017. The school had a student-run radio station called the Voice of Brown College (VBC), with fifth-quarter students operating the studio in the mornings.