Admissions recruiting—Harvard toured 110 U.S. cities and “a good portion of the world”—might also help explain “uneven” geographic trends within the aggregate increase, he said.

The number of international early applicants rose by 46 percent—520 this year compared to 357 last year.

Fitzsimmons said he expected this trend would continue, especially since Harvard had “a new president and a new dean for whom internationalization is certainly a very high priority.”

Additionally, both the Pacific and mid-Atlantic regions saw 30.4 percent increases in early applications. Increases in other regions ranged “anywhere from 13 to 19 percent,” Fitzsimmons said.

Suggesting another potential explanation for the regional discrepancies, Fitzsimmons said that there had been “some speculation...that the events of 9-11 may have kept down the numbers of applications from the West Coast and some of the applications from abroad, particularly in the Middle East” in 2001.

The size of Harvard’s increase surprised college counselors at secondary schools that traditionally send a number of students to Harvard.

“Twenty-five percent is huge,” said Stephen Singer, director of college counseling at Horace Mann, a private school in the Bronx, N.Y.

“It’s a significant increase, no matter how you cut it,” said Lawrence J. Momo, director of college counseling at Trinity School, a private school in Manhattan.

Momo said that his office had sent “roughly the same number” of early admissions applications to Harvard this year.

Prieto, Singer and counselors at Stuyvesant, a magnet public high school in Manhattan, Collegiate, a private school in Manhattan and Roxbury Latin, a private school in Boston, concurred, noting that they had seen little—if any—change in the number of early applications to Harvard from their schools.

But Bruce Breimer, Collegiate’s director of college guidance, said he could understand the increases in terms of the national focus on early admissions programs.

“We have early on the brain,” he said. “In some ways I’m surprised that [Collegiate’s number of early applicants] are not up more.”

Singer said he attributed the surges in early admissions applications to “the frenzy of early.”

“It’s perceived increasingly to be a strategic advantage, and more and more kids are applying early in the hope of getting it over with,” he said.

Fitzsimmons, who said the increased number of applications has produced “a lot of work in a short time” for Harvard’s admissions office, said that he still expected Harvard to notify its early applicants as scheduled, on Dec. 13.

“We had to be creative, but we’ve gotten through it successfully,” he said.

—Staff writer Divya A. Mani can be reached at mani@fas.harvard.edu.