I graduated from Trinity in '07. Loved it. It is expensive but I had some scholarship money and some financial aid....still had $35k of student loans when I graduated that I paid off as soon as I could after I graduated.
To state the obvious, it is a totally different type of school than UT. There is effectively one college bar (Bays) and the rest of the social scene is small local frat/sorority life, which was actually a ton of fun if that's your thing (although to be clear - the greek life is on a totally smaller scale than what you would expect at UT). There was a moment after my freshman year I contemplated transferring to UT, but at that point I had already made a bunch of new friends and was enjoying the school...and Austin is only an hour away.
I'm in Houston now and I wish Trinity had a bigger network in the business community, so that's probably my biggest beef with the school even though that's just the nature of a small school. I feel like the school's reputation continues to get stronger only because UT and A&M are becoming increasingly more difficult to get into.