Northwestern’s record admissions season this year comes on the heels of startling growth for the university and some of its peers in the past few years.

Never has the university received so many applications and never has it turned away such a high percentage, according to Associate Provost Michael Mills. But this is the university’s third-straight record applicant pool, and the number of applicants has jumped 77 percent since 2003. The acceptance rate has dropped 38 percent in that time and, at 25 percent, is at its lowest in history.

But other high-profile schools have seen similar gains — for example, Cornell had 60 percent more applicants this year than in 2003. Northwestern accepted 893 more students this year than it did in 2006, because the admissions office foresees a lower enrollment rate of admitted students, Mills said in an e-mail.

“We accepted more students because we knew we had to” to get the right number of freshman, Mills said, because more qualified students have more colleges to choose from.

But the increase in the quality of admitted students in the past two or three years “is unprecedented, even among Ivy League and quasi-Ivy schools” such as Stanford, Duke and MIT.

“You just don’t see” the jumps in Northwestern’s average SAT scores from one year to the next at elite schools, although Northwestern does not obsess over SAT results, he said.

Mills cites stronger outreach as a reason for more applicants. NU representatives travel to high schools at home and abroad, and some deans e-mail and write to strong students “to pique their interest in NU,” Mills said.

Mills said he expects the admit rate to continue to drop, “as more students elect to apply.” The admissions office plans to add more application readers for the next school year.