"For the time being, my interest in public service has shifted to the non-profit sector," Lang says, "but I don't know that that is permanant. My main interest in politics and the IOP has always been how government works as an agent in people's lives; it can have such a huge effect."

At the IOP, she adds, she focused her efforts on the institute's Community Action Committee, which combined community service with grassroots activism and politics proper.

Praising Lang's efforts, McLain pointed out that "she's someone who might have gone to Washington five years ago, but now she's starting her own non-profit."

"Even people who aren't 'selling out' are pursuing leadership in nontraditional ways. Our class is doing more innovative things with regard to leadership," he says.

Teaching is also seeing something of a renaissance, as programs like Teach for America raise the profile of profession.

"As trite as it sounds, I really wanted to make a difference," says former Undergraduate Council Vice President Kamil E. Redmond '00, who will be teaching in Baltimore, Md., for two years before entering Yale Law School.

Redmond, like the many other college students surveyed by the IOP and the Panetta Institute this year, says she believes hands-on service work makes more of an impact than the bureaucratic "paperwork" of government agencies.

Furthermore, as Guilford College's Zweigenhaft points out, many of the men and women he interviewed with William Domhoff for his 1998 book, Diversity in the Power Elite, ended up in the upper echelons of the civil service only after many twists and turns along their career paths.