In advance of next week’s key Democratic primary there, Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama are making a swing through college campuses deep in the heart of Texas.

In South Texas, where Ms. Clinton has been polling ahead of her rival, Mr. Obama sought to rouse students at the University of Texas-Pan American late last week. According to this account on The Washington Post’s campaign blog, the senator from Illinois spent about 45 minutes talking with students about paying for college and got an earful about their problems with financial-aid rules and credit-card debt.

In response, the Post said, Mr. Obama pitched his plan to provide an annual tax credit of $4,000 for students, which he said would nearly wipe out the average college debt accumulated by students in Texas. The Wall Street Journal also quoted Mr. Obama as providing this advice: “Just be careful about those credit cards, all right? Don’t eat out as much.”

Earlier last week — the day before the two candidates debated at the University of Texas at Austin — Mrs. Clinton drew a crowd at the University of Texas at Brownsville, less than a mile from the border with Mexico.

There, reported the Associated Press, the senator from New York promised to make college affordable for all Americans, improve education for Hispanic people, and develop a plan to battle illegal immigration that is better than current proposals that threaten to divide the Brownsville campus with a border fence.

The Texas primary will be held on March 4. Voters in Ohio, Rhode Island, and Vermont also will cast their ballots that day.