The economic downturn has resulted in more people enrolling in the University of Washington Tacoma’s (UWT) Milgard School of Business, according to the Economic Development Board (EDB) for Tacoma-Pierce County. In its newsletter this month, the EDB reports undergraduate courses offered by UWT attracted 320 applications this academic year. The two-year MBA course received 32 new applications. Not all the applications, however, could be accepted because state budget cuts forced the school to reduce the number of classes. Similarly, at the UWT’s Institute of Technology, enrollment in the undergraduate program is up 27 percent and that at the graduate program 22 percent compared with last year’s fall quarter, according to the EDB. UWT director of external relations, Mike Wark, notes, “When the economy goes down, demand for higher education goes up. This is a cycle we’ve observed for decades.”