The university's reputation for academic excellence combined with old-fashioned college fun has been soaring. Its football and basketball teams have been winning. And in the affluent suburbs of Northern Virginia, it has become one of the most sought-after college destinations, threatening to eclipse even the University of Virginia as the place to go for ambitious students who want the most challenging college environment.

"It is one of those schools that has had a really solid regional reputation but in the last five to seven years has been growing rapidly into a strong national reputation as well," said Rob Franek, author of the Princeton Review college guide, "The Best 361 Colleges."

Shirley Bloomquist, an educational consultant and former college counselor at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Fairfax County, Va., said the school "is more competitive every year" in the fight to enroll the best students, because of both its athletic success and rising reputation for engineering and other science and math disciplines.

The university Web site said 21,937 undergraduates were enrolled this school year, plus more than 4,000 graduate students. Virginia Tech has been accepting about 70 percent of freshman applicants, although that rate is much smaller for its highly valued engineering departments. Its percentage of minority undergraduates has been lower than that found in more selective colleges: 7 percent Asian, 4.4 percent African-American and 2.3 percent Hispanic.

Franek said one of the remarkable things about Virginia Tech undergraduates is their widespread view that they can have very active social lives, root for nationally ranked athletic teams and yet attend classes run by some of the most formidable professors in their fields. The hiking trails and rivers of rural southwest Virginia are also a big draw.

It still has the feel of a tech school, with 59 percent of its undergraduates male, in contrast to many female-dominated colleges today. Twenty-six percent of the students are from out-of-state; they pay nearly $18,000 a year in tuition. That's three times the tuition for in-state students.

Established in 1872 as the Virginia Agricultural and Mechanical College, the school later became known as Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University; its name has been shortened to Virginia Tech. U.S. News and World Report recently ranked it 34th among national public universities, but its engineering school ranked much higher, No. 17. Its industrial engineering program ranked seventh and its civil engineering program 11th.