Render node from Controller
Of course as soon as I posted this I figured an answer. This looks a little ugly, but I guess this is the way to go:

public function content() {
  $nodes = $this-&gt;getStudents();

  foreach ($nodes as $node) {
    $student = \Drupal::entityTypeManager()
      -&gt;getViewBuilder('node')
      -&gt;view($node);
    $students[] = render($student);
  }

  return [
    '#theme' =&gt; 'dashboard',
    '#students' =&gt; $students,
  ];
}


Basically, I'm looping through the list of nodes, getting the view builder on each, then calling the render function and adding it to a new array. I had stumbled on this earlier because I was using viewMultiple, which output another array...

If you have a cleaner implementation with viewMultiple let me know.