Applications Surge to Berkeley and Virginia, Slow to Columbia and Middlebury For a printer-friendly version of the chart, click here. This is the time of year when The Choice blog reaches out to more than 100 colleges across a broad spectrum - public and private, elite and (perhaps) more welcoming - to sketch a portrait of this year's full application cycle, including early and regular submissions. The more than 40 colleges and universities that have thus far responded to our queries (as depicted in the running tally above) are hardly a representative sample of the nation's more than 2,000 four-year institutions of higher education. So we will save you the trouble of telling us the list isn't comprehensive. And yet, to those students who applied to these and other universities this year, perhaps these preliminary statistics begin to provide a bit of a rough sense of the relative dimensions of the pools in which you've chosen to dive - if not necessarily definitive reasons why one particular college got hot, and another cooled down. And yet, the institutions themselves, at least, have their theories, and in some cases we do, too. At the University of California, Berkeley, applications are up nearly 17 percent over a year ago - a "notable increase" that was mirrored at other campuses in the U.C. system, says Janet Gilmore, a Berkeley spokeswoman. The relatively low cost of a public education in California, even with steep, state-mandated hikes in tuition in recent years, is likely a factor. And yet, the university did not announce until after its Nov. 30 application deadline that it would, as my Times colleague Jennifer Medina wrote at the time, "offer far more financial aid to middle-class students starting next fall, with families earning up to $140,000 a year expected to contribute no more than 15 percent of their annual income." Cost also appeared to be on the minds of applicants to Babson College in Boston, where applications are up more than 8 percent over a year ago. "Families are looking more at the aspect of "value," and not solely at the sticker price," Grant M. Gosselin, dean of undergraduate admissions, wrote in an e-mail. Families are asking more questions about four-year graduation rates (as opposed to five- and six-year rates), employment placement rates upon graduation, and long-term economic potential. And what of those that saw a drop in applications, including Columbia and Middlebury? For Columbia University, which saw a nearly 9 percent drop in undergraduate applications from last year, one culprit is the 33 percent increase in submissions in 2011, when compared to 2010. What helped cause last year's upward swing? It was the first year that Columbia agreed to accept the Common Application, the universal form accepted by more than 450 colleges and universities. The University of Virginia saw a similar jump in applications this year - nearly 18 percent - after restoring an early admission program, after a four-year hiatus. And sometimes, it is worth pointing out to the current college applicants in our readership (and those who will follow them), it's not necessarily clear what is behind a particular application trend. At Middlebury College in Vermont, for example, where applications are off about 4.5 percent, "there was no anecdotal evidence this year that cost factors are any more or less of a concern," Sarah Ray, director of public affairs, wrote in an e-mail, citing Greg Buckles, dean of admission. "There was a more diverse pool in ED1," she wrote, referring to the first round of Middlebury's binding early-decision program, and "a big surge of applications between mid-December and Jan. 1." Colleges that wish to have their preliminary data considered for inclusion in the chart above should e-mail it, following the same format, to Dan Slotnik's attention at thechoicenyt@gmail.com. Meanwhile, we welcome your comments, as always, using the box below. We will continue to update the chart above, as news warrants. You can find a chart with the most up-to-date early admission figures for this year's application cycle here. And here's is our full chart for the 2011 admissions year. Correction: January 23, 2012 An earlier version of this post cited the announcement of a program to provide tuition relief to middle class students as a possible factor in the rise in applications at the University of California, Berkeley. That program was announced after the university's Nov. 30 deadline for regular applications.