After spending their high-school years strategizing about how to get into college, many students are arriving on campus and immediately starting to plot how to jump-start their careers.

A. Tariq Shakoor, director of career services at Emory University in Atlanta, says he has never seen such "purposeful career planning" among first- and second-year college students. "Competition [for jobs] is more intense than ever before, and I think these students and their parents realize that," he says.

One such student is Brooke Nevils, a 19-year-old freshman at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. She says she knows that "college is supposed to be a time when you're figuring out what you're interested in," and she would love to take "fun" courses like art history. But, she says, the pressure to position herself for a job is intense, so instead she's preparing for a double major: political science, for a career in law, and writing, "because it's a skill everyone needs."

Students' anxiety about what lies beyond graduation isn't surprising. They lived through the dot-com crash and the recession as young teenagers. Some, including Ms. Nevils, saw their parents struggle to replace jobs after they had been laid off. "I know what it's like to be at the mercy of the economy," she says. "Watching my parents go through that increases the pressure to be successful."

Students also worry about landing jobs that will be lucrative enough to repay their steep college loans. Over the past 10 years, average tuition and fees rose 47% at four-year public colleges and 42% at private colleges, according to the College Board.

The past few years have been particularly tough on college graduates looking for jobs. For the first time in a decade, employers cut the number of graduating seniors they hired from the class of 2002, according to the National Association of Colleges and Employers.

Job prospects may be looking up for students graduating this year. A recent survey of 360 U.S. companies by the National Association of Colleges and Employers found that the companies, which are big and small and represent a variety of industries, expect to hire 12.7% more new college graduates this year than last. But many companies remain cautious about adding employees, and they often look to their intern pool to try out young applicants for full-time positions.

In fact, the need to land just the right internship by the summer of junior year is another factor pushing freshmen and sophomores to make early career choices. Monica Huerta, a freshman at Rhodes College in Memphis, Tenn., got an internship that will start this summer at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis. Although she would like to take some religion courses, she has ruled those out in favor of math and science courses to prepare for a career in the biological sciences. "I'm interested in an area where you have to know what you do from the beginning," she says.

The job focus among freshman and sophomores is spilling into classrooms, where professors and administrators complain about the rising number of students who focus on grades and avoid taking intellectual risks. Students are arriving at college "prepackaged and not willing to explore different options," says Sheila Curran, the executive director of Duke University's career center. But Duke does talk with freshmen and their parents about career options. Starting this year, the career center's services will be highlighted on the CD sent to new freshmen before they arrive on campus to educate both parents and students about their options.

Cyrus Pow, an 18-year-old freshman at Syracuse University, admits he spends "an insane amount of time" on career planning. Ever since he took an economics course at a community college when he was 16, he has dreamed of becoming a stock analyst at a Wall Street concern. And ever since he enrolled at Syracuse six months ago, he has been working on transferring to a college that he considers more elite, in order to increase his chances of landing a Wall Street job.

Mr. Pow says he has pored over college ratings and talked to several top financial-services companies to discover which schools would give him "the best launching pad onto Wall Street." He hopes to transfer to New York University or Washington University in St. Louis because of their well-known business programs, he says. This summer, the Hong Kong native, who is financing his education with a mix of grants and loans, also plans to take a course in Asia-Pacific business affairs and other finance subjects.

Will Schindler, a 20-year-old junior majoring in computer science and music at the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma, Wash., has worked on his school's computer help desk since freshman year, both to earn money and build his résumé. Still, he worries about landing a technical job after graduation. He sees stiff competition at his school for even part-time help-desk jobs.

Because of the tight job market, he's thinking of entering the U.S. Air Force Officer Training School, where he hopes he could do technical work. "I never would have considered that a few years ago," he says.