"It feels anonymous, it feels bureaucratic," Erickson says. "It's an incredibly odd feeling to walk into a dorm with 500 people in it, to walk down a hallway and know that behind every door is a person exactly your age, there for exactly the same reasons."

Perhaps in response, many Deep Springers have elected to live off campus. Dewis and Kshirsagar live in the Dudley Co-op; Erickson and Wambsgans have off-campus apartments.

But the most notable difference between the two colleges is what graduates do with their lives. Many Deep Springs alumni shy away from earning money for its own sake--Erickson says 60 percent of graduates pursue doctoral degrees, and a large number find careers in academics.

And half of Deep Springs graduates never marry, he says.

Deep Springers say there's nothing that marks them out as relationship-shy--"most of the Deep Springers are personable guys with perfectly healthy relationships," Erickson says--except maybe a love of solitude.

It takes a particular kind of person to appreciate the "immense amount of space" in the valley, as Wambsgans puts it.

But once they arrive, nearly all of them seem hooked for life.