Stephanie Swisher is settling in nicely as a freshman at the University of Virginia, enjoying classes, Naval ROTC, club volleyball and football Saturdays.

Things are going so well, in fact, that she would rather not return to Tulane University in New Orleans – the school she had expected to attend until Hurricane Katrina struck.

“The argument that everyone’s giving me is that I’m a freshman so I’ve never known Tulane, I need to give it a chance,”‘ she said. “My argument is, why should I have to?”

Swisher probably will have to give Tulane a chance. Despite her wishes – and a 600-signature petition she helped organize – Virginia is sticking by the conditions under which visiting students were admitted after the hurricane: They must return when their school reopens, scheduled for Jan. 17.

After Katrina, colleges around the country took in an estimated 18,000 displaced New Orleans students.

Now, the New Orleans schools desperately need those students to return next semester and pay tuition.

Exactly how many will return won’t be known until January. Tulane says 80 percent of its students have already re-registered. Loyola University, which received little damage, just started registration and can only say more than half for now. The situation will likely be more dire at schools like Xavier and Dillard, which are poorer and suffered more storm damage.

Some students simply want to stay where they are, particularly freshmen who did not have a chance to get attached to their original schools.

Student councils at Virginia, Harvard and the University of California, Berkeley, have passed resolutions calling on their schools to be more flexible in letting New Orleans students at least apply to transfer.

Officially, those and other colleges are saying no, wary of breaking their promises to other schools or, in some cases, of letting students use the situation to “trade up” to a more prestigious school.

Of course, students won’t truly be forced to return; host colleges can simply refuse to let them transfer there next semester. There’s also nothing to prevent students from withdrawing from their New Orleans schools and trying to transfer next fall like any other student.

So the question becomes, if students are determined to transfer, why force them to return to New Orleans at all?