(FORTUNE Magazine) – WHILE THEIR baby-boomer counterparts of the 1960s sat in at universities, + stood up for civil rights, and danced to the music of Sly and the Family Stone, the college class of 1989 was just learning to walk. Times a-changed. Now those who toddled in 1968 stand on the doorstep of the 1990s, mortarboard on head, tassel to the left. These young men and women are confident, ambitious, and smart -- when they applied to college their SAT scores were the highest in ten years. They are also out for themselves. Says Skip Sturman, director of career and employment services at Dartmouth: ''The worst fear these kids have is commitment.'' Seldom have the personal attitudes of a graduating class meshed so neatly with the needs of business. The class of 1989 is entering a corporate world that is just as averse to the ''C'' word. Restructuring has flattened organization charts, pared unprofitable businesses, and severed many of the ties that traditionally bound a company to its workers. Lifelong employment is now the exception; no deal is permanent. Says David L. Birch, a consultant and author of Job Creation in America: 1985-1995, ''There is no grand design, and the kids know it.'' The trick now is for graduates and those who hire them, supervise them, and work with them to acknowledge how right each is for the other. Managed with an eye toward the new realities, these graduates may end up a flexible, creative, productive work force. Managed poorly, they could sour into a generation of jaded, dissatisfied employees who skip from firm to firm taking company secrets with them as they scratch what career counselors call ''the 18-month itch.'' This year's graduates are birth-dearthers. They are three years younger than the last of the baby-boomers, the enormous demographic bulge of 76 million men and women born from 1946 to 1964. With the labor pool growing less rapidly, the '89ers will have no trouble finding corporate jobs. Says Princeton University sociologist Marvin Bressler: ''For years employers treated employees like commodities.'' Now employees can treat companies like commodities. Hiring is up in almost all industries, according to Victor R. Lindquist, director of placement at Northwestern University, who studies employment trends for college graduates in business. The most sought-after jobs are in banking, management consulting, and engineering. According to Patrick Scheetz, who conducts an annual study at Michigan State University, average starting salaries for those with bachelor's degrees nationwide will be an estimated $23,810, vs. $22,980 last year. The best paid? Chemical engineers, whose starting salaries average just over $32,000. Jobs are one thing, careers are another. Once they pass their pre-employment physicals, the new graduates will encounter not only a corporate ladder with fewer rungs, but also aging boomers occupying every one. Says David W. Rhodes, a human resources consultant with Towers Perrin: ''The big question new employees will be asking over the next few years is 'Am I going to progress quickly?' And the answer is 'No.' '' Little wonder students seem to be majoring in what Brown University career counselor Victoria Ball calls ''planned indecision.'' True, the kids are interviewing, and true, come September, most will be working, the overwhelming majority of them in business. But nothing is final. Says Virginia Stimpson, a class marshal for Harvard's graduates: ''It all seems so random. People say, 'Ah, what the hell, I'll apply for this.' And then they're hired.'' Ambivalence reigns. Says Dartmouth's Sturman: ''The watchword on campus now is: I'm keeping my options open.'' Options include more school. Applications for law school are up 18% over last year, and medical schools are seeing their first increase in applicants since 1985. The number of people taking the Graduate Record Examination, the test most graduate schools require, is over 50% higher than it was five years ago. Test taking for business school continues at record levels. Students say the increase reflects not so much passionate interest in advanced academics as a desire to put off any hard and fast career decisions. Some red-hot jobs take advantage of this wish to hang fire. Top management consulting and investment banking firms pay new B.A.s up to $50,000 a year, including bonuses. But the jobs, internships really, usually last only two years. ''After that,'' says senior after senior, ''I'll probably go to business school. After that, I'll do something else.''

Companies should recognize what makes the class of 1989 different. In the past, kids fresh out of college have been bewildered, alienated, or frighteningly avaricious. Think of Dustin Hoffman in scuba gear, looking up at life from the bottom of his parents' swimming pool in the 1967 movie The Graduate. Or recall Charlie Sheen's lucre-loving Bud Fox, bathing in the eerie light of his Quotron late into the night in Wall Street. Neither image fits this class. More in the swim of things than Hoffman's Benjamin Braddock, but less bent on money than Fox, they fall somewhere in the middle.

To be sure, the graduates are not exactly indifferent to the green stuff. The winning design for the official T-shirt of Harvard's class of 1989 displays the motto GOING FOR THE GOLD on the front. The meaning becomes clear on the back, which features a big gold credit card. Every year Alexander W. Astin, a professor at UCLA's Graduate School of Education, surveys the attitudes of the incoming freshman class. He discovered that 71% of the class of 1989 believed that ''being very well off financially'' was extremely important, while only 43% felt that way about ''developing a meaningful philosophy of life.'' That's a big change even from the recent past: When members of the class of 1980 were polled, about 61% were very concerned about a philosophy of life, while 53% valued being well off. Another finding: The class of 1989 had startlingly ''establishment'' views on crime and punishment, even though most of them probably have not read the Dostoevski novel. Woe to Raskolnikov were these students his judges. Most said that they strongly supported the death penalty. Only about 20% thought marijuana should be legalized. This year's seniors also wanted government to do more to protect the environment and the consumer. Because it is done when students are freshmen, Astin's study does not weigh the effect of a college education. But surveys done by CollegeTrack, a New York City market research and consulting firm, paint much the same picture. According to CollegeTrack, financial security is a major goal in life for 93% of college seniors. For 75% of them, the most important factor in selecting a college course was how helpful it would be to a career. Says Stuart Himmelfarb, president of CollegeTrack: ''These people have focused on themselves. They've bought into the process.'' And what a process it is. A sort of theater has sprung up around the business of hiring. Both sides are playing games, only the football is a job. Feints are common. Fred Madaus, placement director at the school of business at the University of Kansas, observes that recruiters like to see candidates who are ''up to the eyeballs in campus activities.'' The reasoning: Active people are probably well organized; good leaders in school are likely to make good leaders on the job; and the candidate who cares about others will be more prone to care about work. So counselors advise students to join something, anything, to list as an activity on their resumes. Cagey students oblige. FOR STUDENTS the interview process has become less a mutual sharing of information than a rote performance. According to Valerie Dabady, a Brown senior headed for law school, the good interview becomes the one wherein you ''say what the recruiter wants you to say.'' Hip job hunters push ''talk smack,'' the throwaway conversation, usually about sports, that students think recruiters are addicted to. ''Hockey players interview especially well,'' asserts Harvard senior Jennifer Samsel. ''The word is investment banking recruiters love talk smack.'' Companies can be equally slick. Recruiting literature understandably accentuates the positive, but often at the cost of providing more useful, honest information. Says William Corwin, assistant director of career services at Princeton: ''Why can't companies just once include a picture of a guy working when it's dark outside?'' In its employment literature, Saks Fifth Avenue frequently uses professional models -- the kind who wear the clothes that don't fit anyone else -- to represent its employees. You don't want to work with these beautiful people, you want to date them. Corwin holds up what he believes to be admirable recruiting material -- no pictures, straightforward job descriptions, and salary information. It is for a Japanese company. He also commends Citicorp and Alex. Brown & Sons, the Baltimore investment bank, for their no-nonsense brochures. What often gets lost along the way is straight talk. A senior told Merck that its low turnover rate was one of the primary reasons she signed on with the company. She also liked the pharmaceutical company's training program, figuring that it would make her a better candidate for business school in a few years -- a career goal she didn't bother mentioning to Merck. Elizabeth Marsh, 21, a Princeton senior on her way to medical school, reports the advice students give each other at interview time: ''Play by the rules. Tell them you love the company. Tell them you will never leave.'' Employers respond in kind. William Kucker, the top recruiter for General Electric, says, ''We're looking for people to make a commitment.'' But that company has eliminated 100,000 jobs over the past eight years. Students are quick to pick up on the contradiction. Says Barbara Waugh, Hewlett-Packard's worldwide recruiting manager: ''Students are getting socialized by their schools and by the culture at large to be loyal to their own career rather than to the company.'' H-P, which does value employee loyalty, has a plan to counter the trend. Through its Student Employment and Education Development Program, the company identifies potential employees while they are still in college. H-P gives these students summer internships and keeps up with them during the school year by sending them company newsletters and subscriptions to technical journals. AS HEWLETT-PACKARD'S example suggests, a company that takes the trouble to figure out what's really driving students has a better chance of finding where its interests and theirs converge. Take the matter of money. The apparent greediness of many a student may be a reaction to the enormous financial burden of a college education. Four years at an Ivy League school costs about $80,000, including books, clothes, and miscellaneous expenses. Few families can afford that kind of money without tightening belts. An otherwise flippant young man who will soon start a job in management consulting shows a touch of abashment in explaining how he financed his education: ''My parents are divorced. My father is an engineer for Boeing, but he refused to help. So I worked extra, and my mom took out a second mortgage on our house.'' College seniors owe an estimated $10 billion in school loans, roughly what the entire country of Argentina owes to private U.S. banks. The discipline of debt is doing for graduates exactly what it is supposed to do for managers of a company leveraged to the moon in an LBO -- it focuses attention on the business at hand. But this year's group is not quite so greedy as the would-be yuppies who cakewalked to Wall Street or into corporations during the avaricious Eighties. The graduates have seen many of those who have gone before wander back to dear old Alma Mater, shellshocked from the 1987 crash, restructured into unemployment, or simply disillusioned. ''I ran into a guy I know from school who had gone into investment banking a couple of years ago,'' says Alix Pustilnik, 21, a Columbia senior who has a public service fellowship for next year. ''He was really bright. But he had been laid off. He was living at home with his parents.'' It all adds up to still more confusion. Liggy Chien, 21, who just graduated from Rice University and hopes to become a business consultant, makes being very well off financially into a meaningful philosophy of life. Says she: ''What you need to make a difference in this world is money and influence.'' Chuck Cattano, who thinks his Berkeley classmates still cling to ideals, says: ''You have to ask yourself, 'Do I have the time to change the world?' '' Some students think they do, an impulse employers should note. Enrollment in the Peace Corps, a way station for altruistic college grads in the past, is limited by its congressionally determined budget and lingers far below the organization's heyday in the mid-1960s. But interest is up. After bottoming out in 1987 at about 10,300, applications for the Peace Corps jumped 22% in 1988. For the first three months of this year, applications are up a further 33%. THE CORPS has learned marketing. Its projects are no longer limited to teaching English and modern agriculture in the Third World. Now a volunteer could easily be involved in developing a local bank. Promotional material includes a list of ''Notable Former Peace Corps Volunteers,'' broken down by present employment, which would come in mighty handy if you wanted to do a little networking after finishing up your two-year stint in South America. Vivian Hunt, another Harvard class marshal, gave up a $46,000 job offer from a top consulting firm to go to Senegal as a health worker. When she returns she would like to go into business, and after that join a nonprofit agency. The increased interest in the Peace Corps reflects a broadening of concerns among the '89ers. Practically without exception, educators say volunteer work by students is increasing. One example: The Harvard House and Neighborhood Development Program, under which each undergraduate residence sends volunteers to act as mentors and coaches to elementary school students in a local neighborhood, has grown 38% over the past year. A can-do, want-to-do attitude like this is good news for companies. Ernest L. Boyer, president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and author of College: The Undergraduate Experience in America, finds much about U.S. higher education disappointing, but he lightens the gloom when it comes to the work ethic: ''Employers will be dealing with young people who want to work.'' To compete in the 1990s, companies will have to find new ways to engage the energies and ambitions of their employees. Simply redoing the organization chart will not be enough. Says Jerrold Bratkovich, managing director of the Hay Group for the western region: ''What is needed is a total rethinking of job design.'' Rosabeth Moss Kanter in her new book When Giants Learn to Dance suggests one idea: jobs and compensation tied to projects, and somewhat independent of the typical corporate hierarchy. Another solution: more backing for teams dedicated to innovation, whether in products or processes. Companies will have plenty of time to experiment under the combined pressures of restructured organizations and a dwindling new labor force. The population of 22-year-olds won't pick up significantly until about 2002.

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