Applications were way up this year at Dartmouth College, but the Ivy League school didn't accept more high school seniors as a hedge against the bad economy.

The college has offered admission to a total of 2,184 applicants, including 401 students admitted this fall in its binding early admission program. That's roughly the same number of students Dartmouth has accepted over the last five years, said Maria Laskaris, dean of admissions and financial aid.

Applications were up 10 percent over last year - with 18,130 students applying - and have increased 80 percent over the last decade, said Laskaris, a Dartmouth 1984 graduate.

The large applicant pool makes for hard choices for her 15-member staff, Laskaris said.

"These decisions are really, really difficult," she said.

Unlike Dartmouth, many private colleges have admitted more students than usual this year, as they wait to find out whether families find higher tuitions difficult to manage in the recession.

As of Wednesday's deadline to notify most applicants, many schools have sent out more acceptance letters, built bigger waiting lists and pumped more money into financial aid to lure students to their campuses.

At Johns Hopkins University, officials were on edge in the fall when applications were down by as much as 35 percent, then taken aback by a surge that left them with a 1 percent increase over last year's record number. Still, they offered admission to 250 more students than usual and increased the size of their wait list by about 10 percent.

"The world is changing pretty fast," said John Latting, dean of undergraduate admissions at Hopkins. "I just don't know what's going to happen."

Dartmouth's regular admission students were able to find out on the college website whether they had been accepted after 5 p.m. on Tuesday, the notification time set by the eight Ivy League schools.

Laskaris attributed the increase in applications to the strength of the college's academics and its financial aid program, new last year, which offers free tuition for students from families with annual incomes of less than $75,000.

In addition, she said a larger pool of college students worldwide, greater outreach to them by Dartmouth and the ease of online applications all contributed to the application increase.

And, Laskaris said, the appointment last month of noted global health advocate Jim Yong Kim to be the next president of the college, taking the helm in July, also may be a factor in students' decision to matriculate at Dartmouth.

Dartmouth plans to enroll a class of about 1,090, expecting half of the students the college has accepted to matriculate in the fall.

Also increased this year is the number of students qualifying for financial aid. A little more than 43 percent of the accepted students qualify for assistance, an increase of 14 percent over last year's group. Dartmouth makes decisions on whether to accept students without knowing their family's financial situation, a practice called need-blind admission.

"We want to enable the best students to study at Dartmouth regardless of their financial situation," Laskaris said.

Based on past years' enrollment data, the college is projecting 55 percent of the students who enroll at Dartmouth to receive financial aid, she added.

Laskaris said she didn't know what percentage of those students would qualify for the free tuition program. The total cost to attend Dartmouth next year is $49,974, with $38,445 the tuition cost. For those students receiving free tuition, many will also receive scholarships rather than loans to pay the remainder of the cost.

The college this year has budgeted a 13 percent increase in the total amount of financial aid to be awarded for the 2009-10 school year, to $72 million.

The financial aid money, along with faculty jobs, were the two areas college officials deemed sacred when making cuts in February. Sixty workers were laid off as more than 150 jobs were eliminated as part of the college's plan to save $72 million through June 2011 following the loss of $700 million from its endowment, which in February was worth $3 billion.

The college's acceptance rate for the class of 2013 is 12 percent, the lowest rate ever. That's down from 13.5 percent last year. The drop is due to the larger pool of applicants, Laskaris said.

That puts Dartmouth ahead of the University of Pennsylvania and Cornell University, with acceptance rates of 17 and 19 percent, respectively, according to a recent New York Times story. The lowest Ivy acceptance rate this year is Harvard, at 7 percent, followed by Yale at 7.5, Columbia and Princeton, tied at 9.8 and Brown at 11 percent.

Laskaris noted that the number of early decision students has remained constant. Most years, several students will request to be released from the binding decision because they don't receive enough financial aid to be able to afford to attend the college or because they have chosen to take a year off.

It may be that this year, parents have decided they can't afford to fund a child's year off or a year of travel, Laskaris said.

At Dickinson College, a small liberal arts school in Carlisle, Pa., the number of applications dropped about 5 percent from last year's total and the number of early-decision applicants who were admitted but pulled out for financial reasons doubled. Officials are expecting more students to reject the school this summer as they consider their finances and its $50,200 price tag.

"That makes it very, very difficult for us to project our classes," said Robert Massa, Dickinson's vice president for enrollment.

Material from The Washington Post was used in this report.