Heaven's Gate

For Rosa Guerreiro, Virginia Tech was an obvious choice. It was close to home, relatively inexpensive, and lots of her classmates from Herndon High School were going there. "It had a very good reputation here in Northern Virginia," says Guerreiro, a 34-year-old optometrist who lives in Alexandria. "It also had a beautiful campus set in the mountains."

Guerreiro's parents picked up most of the $5,000- to $6,000-a-year cost (now $10,400), but she took out $8,000 in tax-deferred student loans to pay the rest. Was it worth it to her? "Definitely," she says.

While the size of big state schools scares some students off, Guerreiro found it invigorating. "It was never boring, be it classes or social life or just life in general." Her later course of study, optometry, was extremely specific, she says, but the biology background she got at Tech prepared her well for her graduate work. And the study skills she developed in Blacksburg gave her a good base on which to build.

Ian Reynolds

Yale

When Ian Reynolds went looking for a college his senior year at Langley High School, his focus wasn't on faculty or the location of the campus or how much it might cost. It was on who his fellow students would be. After visiting Princeton University, the University of Pennsylvania, Amherst College and other campuses, he chose Yale because it seemed to have "students who were incredibly passionate about something -- and sometimes the strangest things," says Reynolds, 33, now a principal at Bain Capital, a private investment firm in Boston. "I ended up learning a lot more from my classmates than I did from my professors."

For Reynolds, cost was not a consideration. The roughly $25,000 (now $41,000) a year in tuition and room and board was paid for by his parents.

He majored in East Asian Studies, which doesn't have much to do with his job in finance. But his time at Yale, he says, gave him a broad liberal arts education and made him "much more aware of the world and people around me." He believes the elite degree probably helped him get into Harvard's graduate program, where he received an MBA.

"I made great friends in college, who have been an important support network to me. While we were in school, those friends pushed and challenged me, making me more open to new ideas and experiences."

Vickie Jones

Hampton

Vickie Jones says she had scholarship offers from several schools, including West Virginia University and the College of William & Mary, during her senior year at Herndon High School. But she already knew where she wanted to study: Hampton University, a historically black college in southeastern Virginia.

It wasn't just because her two older brothers were Hampton students. The summer after her junior year, Jones took part in a program at William & Mary for high-achieving black students. She'd always attended predominantly white schools. For the first time, she was surrounded by "so many smart, promising and college-bound black students," says Jones, 33, a senior public relations specialist with a small D.C. firm. That heady experience persuaded her to enroll at Hampton.

Tuition and room and board cost roughly $9,500 (now $19,500) a year, with her parents picking up the tab.

Jones calls her mass media arts degree from Hampton invaluable and credits much of her post-college career to the education, experience and connections she made there. Her roommate's father was head of public relations at the Central Intercollegiate Athletic Association, where Jones held a paid internship. She covered sports for the school paper and met reporters from the local paper, the Daily Press, which led to her first job -- as a sportswriter. She worked in Hampton's public relations office when she was studying for her master's degree in humanities at Old Dominion University in Norfolk.

-- Dante Chinni