Temple’s former enrollment head gets job at Rutgers
Jose Aviles has been named Senior Vice President for Enrollment Management and Student Success at New Jersey’s flagship university. He led enrollment at Temple for two and a half years.
Jose A. Aviles, who abruptly resigned last month as Temple University’s head of enrollment, has taken a leadership role at Rutgers University.
Aviles has been named Senior Vice President for Enrollment Management and Student Success at New Jersey’s flagship university.
“Dr. Aviles’ commitment to data-informed, student-centered leadership will be pivotal to strengthening student recruitment, expanding access and enhancing student success metrics,” Rutgers said in its announcement.
When Aviles announced his exit from Temple, he told The Inquirer he was leaving for “a life-changing opportunity.”
» READ MORE: Temple’s head of enrollment abruptly resigns
Aviles, who served as Temple’s vice president for enrollment and student success for two and a half years, joined the Philadelphia university in 2023, after about six years at Louisiana State University.
In that experience at LSU, he has a tie to Rutgers’ new president William F. Tate IV, who led the Baton Rouge university from 2021 to this July when he became Rutgers’ president.
Aviles left Temple with recent successes under his belt; he had recently been promoted from a vice provost to a vice president.
“Jose has reimagined enrollment management at the university over the last couple of years, helping move us to a modern, technology- and data-driven approach that has delivered results,” Temple president John Fry and interim provost David Boardman said to the campus community last month.
They noted the university achieved growth in first-year enrollment the last two years, with this year’s group reaching a record high of 5,379.
The university also under Aviles’ tenure started the Temple Promise program, which makes tuition and fees free for first-time, full-time college students from low-income families who live in Philadelphia, and the Temple Future Scholars program, a mentoring and college-readiness program.
While Temple’s first-year class was strong, the school fell short of its initial overall enrollment projection by about 700 students, which translates to about $10 million in lost revenue.
The university had been estimating it would enroll a total of 30,100 to 30,300 students, which would have been its first enrollment increase since 2017.
Instead, enrollment came in at 29,503, down about 500 from last year and further declining from its high of more than 40,000 eight years ago. (That does not include enrollment on its Japan and Rome campuses, which increased. Including those campuses, Temple’s overall enrollment was over 33,000, a slight increase from last year.)
There have also been concerns about sophomore retention and a higher percentage of third- and fourth-year students not returning.