GO TO COMMUNITY COLLEGE THIS FALL: If you were going to be enrolling in school this year, it makes a lot of sense right now to go to community colleges or branch campuses to knock out your gen eds. No matter where you go it is (likely) going to be distance learning, so you won't get the social networking benefit of pricier schools.

Many solid universities have "feeder" schools that you can automatically transfer in and out of at will, and that are a fraction of the cost. They even frequently let you take up to half your courses from the main school.

(Related hack: Branch campuses frequently have almost automatic admission, and generally if you pass your classes there for a year you can automatically transfer to the main campus, so this is an easy way to get accepted to schools you might otherwise not. Probably most people reading this blog in high school have high enough scores they could get into any of those schools anyways (these aren't like Ivy leagues or anything), but still good info to know)

Getting any sort of professor job is really hard, so the professors at lower end schools are almost always really passionate about their subject, and if you show interest are happy to work with you if you want to go more in depth on something or whatnot (possibly even more so than professors at pricy schools, where you'll stand out less).