[quote=@Expendable]All the better, a private college. Very few invites. It doesn't accept a lot of outsiders. Very big on letters of recommendation. And not everyone gets accepted.

But, we need the basics of a magic system. How it works. What happens when you don't do it exactly.

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or are spoken enchantments even needed?[/quote]
[quote=@Gisk]I'm actually thinking it was originally a school for magic. At the time that it was founded, arcane study was considered to be so erratic and dangerous that schools were often put in out of the way places. Over time, as advances were made that stigma fell away, so the school is actually older than most of the town. 

I'm thinking of calling it Sanctuary, or something with a similar connotation.[/quote]
Maybe it's considered more like a private Ivy League school - difficult admissions process, requiring outstanding extracurricular activities/achievements or strong SAT/ACT/equivalent scores. It's divided a College of Theurgical and Thaumaturgical Arts which has additional requirements to get into (like how one might have to audition to get into a performing arts school, or need an impressive project on their resume to get into a technical institute) and has interdisciplinary studies within other traditional colleges, which were gradually incorporated in the 1800s/1900s as firearms industrialized, becoming more deadly and gaining equal, if not greater, footing against magic.

For the magic system, I think it makes sense for nothing to happen if you don't have enough materials - like in chemistry, when you don't have enough reagent for a reaction to continue. If you do something wrong, your magic can backfire, sometimes in improbable or bizarre ways, perhaps with even greater force than what your initial input was. A simple prank hex could become a harsh curse.

Maybe magic, like life, is just borrowed energy - as such no spell can last forever, and at some point it must decay and return its energy to nature. A magical contract can fade if it isn't "fed." Everyday enchantments need some kind of fuel to keep going - there are a variety of associated costs or sacrifices with them, but there's [i]always[/i] a price to be paid, even if that price is trivial, silly (perhaps whimsical, even), or embraced with enthusiasm.

Edit: Also, if we're going for a 90's setting, I would love to bring in 90's music for character throwback songs.