In her first year at Duke University, Tiana Mack felt painfully out of place. There she was, a kid from the Bronx on a Gothic-arched campus as plush as a country club. Most of her classmates came from much wealthier families than her own. And most, unlike her, were white.

As her friends started to plan study-abroad adventures to exotic and distant lands last year, Mack began to envision a very different kind of semester away. It would only take her to Washington, a five-hour drive from her freshman dorm -- but it could serve, she hoped, as her escape.

Pierce Minor, meanwhile, had spent three happy years at the University of California at Berkeley, the vibrantly multi-ethnic campus that had been his first choice for as long as he could remember. Yet he couldn't get over the feeling that he was missing something -- exactly what, he didn't know. He, too, decided to leave for a semester.

Both gravitated to an institution that, on the popular national rankings of colleges, sat well below the ones they left behind. But they weren't looking for prestige from Howard University, the nation's largest African American university with about 10,000 students. They were looking for something that felt like home.

"We always wondered what it was like at a black college," said Minor, a fourth-year film student from Los Angeles now completing his semester in Howard's unusual exchange program with several historically white institutions. "I wanted to know why it was important for them to exist."

Mack's and Minor's decision epitomizes the emotional allure that historically black colleges and universities -- virtually the only higher-education option available to their grandparents' generation -- exert over today's top African American students who could go almost anywhere they choose.

The integration movement launched by the Supreme Court's ruling in Brown v. Board of Education 50 years ago next month had a delayed effect on higher education. It was not until the 1960s that many traditionally white institutions began admitting black students; in 1968, about 80 percent of black U.S. college graduates had earned their degrees at historically black colleges.

By the 1980s, though, majority institutions had begun aggressively recruiting minority students. Many created scholarship programs specifically for African American students, while others granted blacks and other minorities an edge in the admissions process, a hotly contested practice that was largely upheld by the Supreme Court last year.

Many black colleges, as a consequence, found themselves outmatched in the competition for the students. Nearly a dozen have closed since the mid-1970s, and the 105 that remain now graduate about 23 percent of the black students who receive college degrees.

Yet while some historically black institutions continue to struggle, others have recently experienced a surge in applications, which some consider a surprising consequence of the successes of integration.

Many of today's black students grew up in public schools where they represented just one of many races, while a growing number attended private schools where they were in the minority. Now they want the experience of being surrounded by people who look like them, said Angela Nixon Boyd, director of admissions at Hampton University, a historically black institution where applications rose by 24 percent this year.

"It's a desire to connect with their culture and to be in an environment where they can relate with individuals who share their interests and background," she said.

The sentimental power of black colleges is so strong among African American students that many of those Boyd met when she worked at mostly-white institutions felt compelled to justify to her why they were not applying to a black college -- a question she certainly wasn't asking.

For black students, it can complicate the already agonizing decision over where to spend a crucial four years of their lives. Khadija Diakité, 18, a high school senior from Amherst, Mass., is trying to choose among American University, Sarah Lawrence College and Spelman College, a black women's college in Atlanta; a friend recently picked Howard over Oberlin College and Yale University.

"A lot of people want to go to historically black colleges for undergrad and then go to white schools for graduate school, so they get a balance of both," Diakité said. "The best of both worlds, I guess."

A similar sentiment drives the exchange program that Howard shares with Duke, Berkeley and Stanford University. Those schools also operate similar exchanges with traditionally black Morehouse College and Spelman.

The exchanges are supposed to be even, meaning that for every student who comes to Howard for a semester or two from another college, a Howard student will take his or her place at the other campus. But according to students who have participated, the competition to come to Howard is especially intense.

The exchanges are supposed to be temporary. Yet Mack, a 19-year-old sophomore, had other plans when she left Duke for Howard last fall: "I went up there with the intention of staying and transferring," she said.

Mack was hardly alone at Duke, which has a larger share of black students than many elite private schools -- about 11 percent. Yet many of her black classmates, she said, came from more privileged backgrounds. "They're gliding along," she said. "They never have to struggle for anything."

She felt that her classes were dominated by talk of "dead white philosophers" that had nothing to do with her experiences or interests. And although she welcomed discussions of race, she grew tired of feeling like "the black person" in some classes, expected to serve as the voice of an entire population.

At Howard, though, from the moment she stepped on campus in September 2003, "I felt that I belonged." It wasn't just that more of her classmates were black. More of them were also middle-class, like her, or from the cities, like her. "They were ambitious, and they were grateful to be where they were," she said. "They never doubted themselves."

Mack found a warmth and spontaneity in her classes, where students might share poetry in the middle of a lecture. And although there were some downsides to attending a college less wealthy than Duke -- fewer work-study jobs to go around, for example -- she cherished the striving mentality it seemed to imbue in her Howard friends.

"They know more about life, because everything wasn't just handed to them," she said.

Minor had no major complaints about life at Berkeley. Still, with an undergraduate population that is only 4 percent African American, he had had the experience of walking across campus without seeing another black face, of sitting in a lecture hall of 400 students and seeing perhaps only one other.

At Berkeley, every visiting student from Howard was greeted like royalty by the tiny African American community, and Minor expected to find that kind of warmth multiplied many times over when he got to Howard in January. He didn't, he said. But that was the reality of being in the majority for once, he realized, and he had no complaints.

"If there are hundreds of black students here," he said, "you don't feel the need to walk up to every one you see."

At Howard, Minor said he found a certain energy in his professors that he said was lacking at Berkeley, which he attributed to its history. "A lot of faculty teach here because it's their way to give back to the black community," he said. One film professor at Howard brought an especially inspiring Afrocentric approach to her class such that Minor, raised on movies like "Boyz N the Hood," found himself going through the video archives for the works of Lena Horne.

"No one's ever made me want to watch older films before," he marveled.

But Minor said he also found himself frustrated by a subtle culture of complacency at Howard, where the dormitories are older, the student center smaller and the library less impressive than Berkeley's. "Sometimes I feel like we deserve better," he said. "There's a saying here, 'That's Howard.' I'm like, that's what they want you to think. At Berkeley, we want something, we get it!"

In the end, Tiana Mack went back to Duke this semester. She loved Howard and still thinks of it often. But she missed the amenities of a wealthy campus -- her own room, the plentiful financial aid -- and the excitement of mixing it up on a multi-racial campus.

"Howard was going to make me a better person," she said. "I felt like Duke was going to make me a better scholar."

As for Pierce Minor, the plan was always to return to Berkeley, where he will graduate next spring. Yet the Howard experience has changed the aspiring movie mogul in other ways.

"I used to say, 'I'm going to build a film school at Berkeley,' " he said. Now, though, "Howard's going to get my money."