Heaven's Gate

Lorna Haughton's decision to attend Washington and Lee University was a simple matter of dollars and cents. As a bookish senior at Herndon High School, she got into Virginia Tech and Spelman College in Atlanta. But Washington and Lee offered her close to a full scholarship to attend the school, which cost about $11,000 a year in tuition alone (annual tuition is now $31,200).

"That basically made the decision for me," says Haughton, a 33-year-old aspiring actress who lives in New York. Her parents, who had emigrated from Jamaica with her when she was 8 years old, were not affluent; the idea of attending a prestigious school without going into debt was too good to pass up.

When she got there, however, she found a school more "steeped in Southern tradition" than she'd realized on her quick visit to the campus in Lexington, Va. "I don't think I'd ever seen a Confederate flag flying before then."

Out of 1,600 students, there were about 40 African Americans, she says. "I can't say I regret going there because the education was a phenomenal education," says Haughton, who received a degree in French and European history and took out a loan of a few thousand dollars to cover incidental costs. "But I might have opted for a bigger school with a more diverse student body."

Robert Levy

Oberlin

As a senior at Marshall High School, Robert Levy wasn't sure where he wanted to attend college. "The one thing I knew was I wanted a place that was small," he says. "I was freaked out by the size of the big state schools."

He applied to William & Mary and Oberlin College and was accepted at both. He wound up choosing Oberlin, a small private school near Cleveland, because it was farther away and he liked its liberal political climate. His parents paid the roughly $25,000 (now $40,700) a year in tuition and room and board.

Levy, who knew he wanted to be a meteorologist, describes his Oberlin experience as mixed. He had the "time of his life" during his years there, he says. Levy, 33, is now a contractor at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. He credits Oberlin with giving him sound research skills and the ability to "string two sentences together," a quality much in demand among scientists.

But he also thinks his physics classes left him somewhat ill-prepared for his master's studies at Colorado State University, where many students had a physics background more targeted toward meteorology. "Looking back," he says, "I probably could have been happy at a big state school. I probably would have found my group."

Rosa Guerreiro

Virginia Tech