Early results on the school’s business admissions show a seven per cent increase in first-choice applications from high school students.

There was also a 37 per cent increase in first-choice transfer requests from students at other universities.

But James Norrie, an associate dean of the Ted Rogers School of Management, said Ryerson already admits thousands of students a year and will not be increasing admittance in 2009.

“Just because we have more applicants doesn’t mean we have more spaces,” he said.

This also means grade cutoffs for business will likely hit the low- to mid-80s this year, the highest they’ve ever been. This means higher grades are required to get into Ryerson’s business programs.

“It’s as difficult to get into Ryerson as it is to get into Queen’s, Western or (University of Toronto), and we accept four to six times as many students,” Norrie said.

These numbers come a week after the Ontario Universities’ Application Centre revealed overall business applications in the province are down by 6,000 from 2008 figures.

The number of Ontario high school students making business their top choice is also down 5.2 per cent, or almost 700 students.

“We’re becoming a destination people choose first,” Norrie said. “We’re no longer the back-up.”

Ryerson has come to depend on business as its flagship faculty. Some 7,000 students attend Canada’s largest undergraduate business school, and about 1,300 new undergrads walk through its doors each year.

Ryerson’s success is the culmination of five years of sustained growth, Norrie said.

“This is not an anomaly, this issue of being ‘The university behind Sam’s’ . . . we’ve broken out of that.”

As for the drop in provincewide applications, Norrie suggests more students are either choosing to take business electives instead of a major, or waiting until grad school to switch to business.

The two-year graduate program already has as many people applying this year as 2008, and the school will still be taking applications for several months.

Keith Alnwick, Ryerson’s registrar, said the global economic crisis might have affected interest in business as well.

“This isn’t something we expect to have a permanent impact,” he said.

Meanwhile, at Agincourt Collegiate in Scarborough, guidance counsellor Cathy Black Jones hasn’t seen any less of an interest in business programs, economic crisis or not.

“Kids are not so in tune to the outside world as we think,” she said. “They don’t ask about the economy unless their parents are scaring them, because parents are talking scared.”