More people are applying to the university than ever before, despite a 13.5 percent tuition increase this school year, Penn State President Graham Spanier told the Board of Trustees at its meeting Friday.

Applications to all of the university's programs were up 10 percent to 56,765 by the second week of January, compared with the same time in 2002.

Undergraduate applications were 9 percent higher at 37,405, with about two-thirds of those coming in over the Web.

"Raising tuition -- it has been shown for most prestigious universities -- does not tend to decrease applications," Spanier said.

But higher costs often discourage lower-income students from applying, he added.

"We might be pricing ourselves out of the possibility of certain students even applying, and thereby eroding our traditional land-grant mission to be the people's university," Spanier told the trustees.

Student trustee Nicole Lobaugh emphasized the importance of funding and advertising scholarships and grants to ensure that lower-income students still apply as tuition continues to rise.

On Sunday, Lobaugh highlighted the Trustee Scholarship Program, a five-year, $100 million initiative launched last summer to attract donors and create new scholarships.

Despite these concerns, university officials called the increase a sign that Penn State remains one of the nation's most popular destinations for higher education.

By the end of the last application period in 2002, the university had received 79,734 applications.

Graduate applications so far this cycle were up 14 percent, and the College of Medicine in Hershey has seen 9 percent more applications by mid-year.

While the Dickinson School of Law continues to struggle with low test scores and low diversity, it has seen a 51 percent jump in applications, to just under 1,000 so far.

Penn State spokesman Steve MacCarthy explained that when the economy is struggling, more people tend to consider graduate school.

Spanier told the trustees that Pennsylvania is seeing two phenomena that may be leading to the increase in undergraduate applications: More students are graduating from high school, and more of those graduates are applying to college.

Another figure administrators check frequently is the "yield," or what proportion of students who get accepted to Penn State ultimately decide to attend.

A couple of decades ago, only about one in four students came to Penn State once the door was opened to them, Spanier said. Today, yield is up to about 40 percent.

"We have to guard against sending out too many offers and finding that we have no housing for them and no classrooms to put them into," Spanier said. "It's a very fascinating thing."

MacCarthy said the university still wants to keep enrollment at University Park at about 42,000. The total headcount at all campuses totals 83,038.