Three summers ago, Ethan Olson packed his life into some boxes and evacuated his Slidell, La., home, swearing to himself he’d “never apply anywhere close to home.” Then a rising high school sophomore, Olson settled 100 miles northeast in Mobile, Ala., as his house joined hundreds of thousands of others flooded with water from Lake Pontchartrain.

Now 17 years old and months away from beginning college, Olson is happily going back on his word.

The high school senior was one of nearly 34,000 applicants to Tulane University, just one of the handful of New Orleans colleges now flooded with applications. Tulane’s teeming applicant pool represents nearly a 100-percent increase over last year and is the largest in the school’s history, said the university’s Assistant Director of Admission Jeff Schiffman.

“At this time our first year after Katrina we were calling people and hoping they would still be interested,” Schiffman said. “Now we’ve nearly doubled our application total. We’re really thrilled.”