Universities are so concerned about this issue that some — Amherst, Tufts, the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard, for example — have expanded public service fellowships and internships. “We’re in the business of graduating people who will make the world better in some way,” said Anthony Marx, Amherst’s president. “That’s what justifies the expense of the education.”

This year, Tufts announced that it would pay off college loans for graduates who chose public service jobs. And officials at Harvard, Penn, Amherst and a number of other colleges say one reason they have begun emphasizing grants instead of loans in financial aid is so students do not feel pressured by their debts to pursue lucrative careers.

In an interview this spring, Dr. Faust held up as a model Teach for America, the nonprofit program that has recruited large numbers of students at top colleges to teach in low-income schools for two years. With 9 percent of Harvard’s senior class applying to Teach for America this year, 37 students made the cut.

One of the seniors that Dr. Faust met with in the winter was Dhaval Chadha, who wanted her support for a “diversity in careers” forum he was organizing. Mr. Chadha, 21, who grew up in India, will spend the next year on a fellowship in Brazil, working with an antipoverty group in preparation for what he says will be his career in public service.

“I don’t think a lot of people at Harvard know what a hedge fund or a consulting firm is when they start,” he said. But then, he explained, juniors and seniors being recruited come back from expensive dinners out and “start throwing salaries around,” and students begin to understand that “there’s already a kind of prestige attached to working for those people.”

“It’s like applying to college all over again,” he added. “ ‘I applied to 8 to 10 Ivy League colleges, and I got in here. I applied to these 40 companies, and I got into these ones.’ It’s exactly the thing that appeals to the Harvard competitive spirit.”

Evgenia Peeva, who will be working for McKinsey, said: “You have to be part of the competition. You have to prove to yourself and everyone else that you can do it.”