TORONTO - Tough economic times are behind a dramatic increase in the number of people hoping to land a coveted spot in an Ontario college or university, the organizations that track applications said Monday.

While the number of high school students applying to university was up a modest 1.1 per cent over last year to 84,300 -- still record-setting territory-- there was a 10 per cent jump in the number of non-high school applicants, the Council of Ontario Universities reported.

"That has happened in past recessions: people have decided to get an upgrade or go back to school for an extra degree," said council president Paul Genest. "I think that's what we're seeing here."

There were 21,128 university applications from non-high school applicants -- which includes former high school students, and mature, transfer and out-of-province students. Because that group doesn't have to comply with the same January deadline as high school students, their numbers could swell to more than 44,000, the council said.

Ontario's colleges have also seen a boost.

There was a 10 per cent jump over the previous year for the winter session, said Linda Franklin, president and CEO of Colleges Ontario, an advocacy group for the province's 24 colleges of applied arts and technology.

"That's telling us that things are moving in a direction ... that people, in a bad economic time, are starting to think more about coming back to school," Franklin said.

The figures suggest that the "majority" of the applicants are people who aren't going to college directly from high school.

"In other words, they're probably in the workforce, or have been laid off," Franklin said.

The province's universities haven't posted application numbers like the ones seen this year since 2003, when Grade 13 was phased out. That created the so-called double cohort, with students from both Grade 12 and 13 heading to post-secondary institutions at the same time.

Universities received 102,618 applications from high school students that year.

The 84,300 high school students hoping to head to university this fall could be faced with some stiff competition.

Last year, some 84,000 high school students applied for 64,000 spots at Ontario's 20 universities.

Figures for the number of spots for the 2009-2010 university year were not available.

Grade cut-offs change every year, and vary for each program in each institution. Last year, most schools made offers to students with minimum grades averaging in the mid-70s or 80s.

Several stringent programs made offers only to students whose average grade was in the low to mid-90 range. Those programs included McMaster University's health sciences, York University's Schulich School of Business and biotechnology at the University of Waterloo.

Some universities begin making offers of admission as early as February, but most institutions send out rolling offers until late May.

Some of Ontario's graduate schools have also seen a jump in the number of applications for next year.

At Queen's University in Kingston, administrators have already received double the number of applications for the prestigious MBA program.

The University of Toronto has seen about nine per cent more grad school applications than it had received at the same time last year.