Texas
Where better than Texas for a road trip to size up what a state's college system has to offer? The Lone Star State guarantees Texas high school students in the top 10 percent of their class a place at the state institution of their choice. We visited four such schools, all within a hot afternoon's drive of downtown Houston but all with a very different feel, to see what set them apart.
University of Texas-Austin
To understand the flagship campus of the University of Texas system, enter from Guadalupe Street—"the drag," as students call it. On the university side is West Mall, a raucous bazaar of philanthropy, cultural performance, and political grandstanding, where students reserve time on open mikes to speak their mind. On the city side, Austin's most bohemian sidewalk teems with merchants, students, and panhandlers. "Keep Austin Weird" is the city's slogan and, in this part of town anyway, it fits like skinny blue jeans.
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University of Houston
Houston rises before the sun, hits the freeways, and heads for work. The University of Houston is a hard-working place as well: Three quarters of its students come from the area, and even more stay on to work after graduation. One of the campus's anchors is the Conrad N. Hilton College of Hotel and Restaurant Management, which takes a typically practical approach: Students help operate a hotel, a conference center, and two restaurants.
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Sam Houston State University
Like many states, Texas aims to boost the number of college graduates from state schools over the next decade, and Sam Houston State is part of the push. Its student population has grown more than 22 percent in the past five years to 16,000, and new buildings and student apartments have cropped up on the Huntsville campus like Texas bluebells, although not all of the extra students have gone there: A satellite campus sits between Huntsville and Houston in a huge planned community called the Woodlands. Huntsville still oozes small-town friendliness, though, and a stranger used to being greeted with "S'up?" eventually will hear an old-fashioned Texas "Howdy."
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Prairie View A&M University
Before it became a college campus, the flat earth beneath Prairie View A&M University, west of Houston, was a cotton plantation worked by slaves. That truth still matters. The majority of Prairie View's 8,000 students are African-Americans, just as were the "colored" students for whom it was founded in 1876, and many consider their fellow students family.
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