Transfers to Temple are up 14% as the college refocuses on recruitment

Odin Soderhielm Edwards, 22, transferred to Temple University last spring from Community College of Philadelphia.

It was a transition, given the much larger campus and bigger lecture-hall style classrooms.

“I don’t get to ask as many questions,” the South Philadelphia student said.

But Edwards said he got a lot of support through peer advising and a first-semester transfer seminar and now is on his way to getting his bachelor’s degree in integrated genetics and genomics. He is considering a career as a physician.

Edwards on Tuesday spoke in Temple’s Sullivan Hall at an event designed to celebrate students who transfer to Temple from other colleges during National Transfer Student Week. It marked the first time the university had held events during the national week — and highlighted the school’s renewed focus on transfer students.

“Transfer students are a vital part of the Temple University community,” president John Fry told the 60 or so people in the audience, a mix of students and administrators from local community colleges and Temple. “We are deeply committed to supporting them.”

The new spotlight on transfer students follows a precipitous decline in a population that Fry flagged soon after he became Temple’s president in 2024. Not long after he began at Temple, Fry was told by folks at CCP that Temple had not been around and had just “checked out,” he said an in interview.

» READ MORE: Temple enrolled a record number of first-year students in 2025. But it lost nearly a quarter of them

Fry did not like hearing that and decided the university needed to pay much closer attention to transfer students.

“We kind of raised hell about it,” Fry said.

He commissioned a task force on transfer students that made 23 recommendations across seven categories, aimed at a series of improvements to help students from initial recruitment through graduation. They included more advisory support, new financial aid and scholarship strategies, and more attention on the process of transferring credits.

Temple also is focused on strengthening partnerships with community colleges. Last summer, the university struck an agreement with Bucks County Community College to ease the transfer of its honors students into a new honors college at Temple that will start next fall.

Some of the efforts are beginning to pay off. This fall, transfer student enrollment at Temple rose 14% from last year, to 1,052, Fry said. He acknowledged during the event that Temple still has a way to go to reach the more than 2,000 transfer students it used to enroll annually.

The drop in transfer students contributed to Temple’s enrollment woes. Enrollment slid by more than a quarter over the last decade. A Temple spokesperson said earlier this month that the school’s domestic enrollment this academic year was 29,156, down by 347 students, or about 1%, from last year.

Overall enrollment, including Temple’s campuses in Japan and Italy, which are growing, reached 33,380. First-year enrollment increased to 5,527, up 2.8% over last year, making up the largest entering class in Temple’s history. But the university has struggled with retaining first-year students; 23% of last year’s entering class did not return this fall. The university has made retention a priority this academic year. Transfer enrollment also has become a focus.

“We have a lot to do, but we’ve already seen positive indicators,” Fry said.

At Tuesday’s event, transfer students talked about why they chose Temple, the support they received, and what the university could do better.

Edwards said he would have liked a more current and accessible listing of clubs and undergraduate research opportunities.

He got his associate’s degree in applied science and medical laboratory technology from CCP in spring 2025 and is working at two local medical labs while getting his degree at Temple. He is scheduled to graduate in 2028.

Brianna Vera, 21, of Langhorne, transferred in fall 2025 after getting her associate’s degree from Bucks County Community College. The supply-chain management major, who is on track to graduate this spring, hopes to use her bachelor’s degree “to travel the world” for work.

She said she got a lot of support from Temple advisers and professors when she transferred in, but would like to see the university better inform students of all the resources it has available.

» READ MORE: Temple enrolled a record number of first-year students in 2025. But it lost nearly a quarter of them

Philadelphia native Maxine Antinucci, 24, earned her associate’s degree at Northampton Community College in the Lehigh Valley and then attended East Stroudsburg University, one of the schools in the state system.

She didn’t like East Stroudsburg and decided to transfer to Temple, which had been her dream school.

Now, Antinucci, who is the first person in her immediate family to go to college, is on track to get a bachelor’s degree in environmental science from Temple in December and plans to pursue a career in wildlife conservation.

“I love Temple,” she said.