Temple has more than tripled its enrollment goal for the 2024-25 year after telling The Temple News last year that it wanted to increase enrollment by five to 10%.
The university has instead seen a 30% increase in its enrollment for the Class of 2028, with 4,926 new students coming into the fall semester, the university announced.
A majority of the new class is made up of first-generation students and Philadelphia natives, which the university believes is a direct result of Temple focusing resources on prospective student outreach.
“Temple prides itself on attracting a broad group of students, students who are oftentimes first generation, or many of them low income, or students who are coming in without all of the information into the college admission process,” said Jose Aviles, vice provost of enrollment management. “They need a relationship. They need to have the opportunity to engage with a professional who understands this, who can guide them, who can counsel them.”
The effort, a collaboration of many departments including enrollment, admissions and housing, was to visit more high schools and offer guidance to underserved students.
The Class of 2028 had a larger application pool, making admissions slightly more competitive than previous years. Temple’s acceptance rate ended up being 2.4% lower than its usual percentage, Aviles said.
BY THE NUMBERS
Forty percent of the Class of 2028 are first-generation college students. Enrollment also included a large number of transfer students, with the university seeing a 29% increase from the previous year. The transfer data includes around 350 University of the Arts students who transferred in after the university’s unexpected closure this past summer.
The increase in enrollment was reflected in Temple’s different undergraduate schools.
As of September 2024, the highest enrollment increases were in the College of Engineering with a 67% increase and the School of Social Work with around an 87% increase. The Boyer College of Music and Dance and Tyler School of Art and Architecture saw increases of 51% and 41%, respectively.
Temple also welcomed a surge of students in its incoming class that are local to the Philadelphia area. Of the current class, 1,108 are from the city. In the past decade, the number of Black students declined from 22% in 2002 to 14% in 2022. The Class of 2028 includes 1,456 Black students, up from 851 in 2023.
The improvements come just a year after Provost Gregory Mandel announced that Temple expected a 1,500 student decrease in enrollment following years of continued declines. Instead, when Aviles assumed the role of vice provost in 2023, the university experienced record-breaking applications in the following year.
College enrollment has generally declined since the COVID-19 pandemic for a variety of reasons, but most notably the rising cost of four-year college.
The average tuition at a private institution has increased by 5.5% in the past year, while public institutions have, on average, increased their tuition by 2.2% for in-state and 2.4% for out-of-state students, according to the U.S. News and World Report.
Temple also experienced difficulty with low enrollment numbers and budget cuts in the years following the pandemic, with enrollment decreased by 21.8% from 2019-23.
ENROLLMENT STRATEGY
The university credits its enrollment success to expanded outreach and providing direct guidance for prospective students. There has also been an effort to include families in the process to strengthen their likelihood of choosing Temple.
“I can just tell you that in my experience leading [enrollment outreach] efforts, what really makes the difference is having our admission staff, who I see as educators in this process, be in relationship with families, making connections and communities, doing grassroots work,” Aviles said.
Students like Brad Prado, a first-generation college student, and James Legg, a freshman musical theater major, found Temple more affordable than other universities after financial aid and scholarships were offered.
“I’m originally from Scranton and I was going to go to the University of Scranton, which is private,” said Prado, a freshman human resource management major. “I would just be commuting. We did the math and I would be paying more to go there than I would to come here.”
Temple overhauled its Merit Scholarship program in an effort to ensure each student had their financial needs met. The effort was to help families fill that gap of need instead of just extending the offer of admission, Aviles said.
Students experienced issues with the Pennsylvania Higher Education Assistance Agency this year after changes were made to the Free Application for Federal Student Aid application that delayed students’ federal aid and restricted their ability to register for classes.
During recruitment, the enrollment office worked to help the students who were accepted to afford to attend Temple.
“We had to be very intentional in the outreach and in the relationships that we established and maintained with these students to ensure that they would not be falling through a crack,” Aviles said.
Temple’s location and opportunities are another reason students like Prado and Legg committed to the university.
“I know [Temple] has a fantastic [musical theater] program, so it was really what I wanted because I wanted a setting where I could be academically involved and do well academically,” Legg said. “Where my program would educate me and where I knew it wouldn’t be competitive and it would be more collaborative.”
HOW OTHER UNIVERSITIES COMPARE
The University of Pennsylvania, Haverford College and Swarthmore College showed decline in enrollment of historically underrepresented students. Swarthmore saw a 4% decline in enrollment of domestic students of color from its previous year, while Penn’s Class of 2028 saw a 2% drop from its Class of 2027 numbers, The Philadelphia Inquirer reported.
Temple is up 24% on its early action applications for its upcoming Class of 2029. Campus visits also increased — nearly 1,400 students have already toured the university. Last year, 558 students toured campus around this time, Aviles said.
The university expects competition will grow between them and other colleges in the region after the enrollment increase they experienced.
“Temple is and has always been focused as an institution that is proudly recruiting students broadly and finding students who have the promise and potential to participate in higher education and with the goal of providing access,” Aviles said.
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