More members of the class of 1984--about 60 percent--will move directly into a job after graduation than in any other class in the past quarter century, according to estimates by Harvard's Office of Career Services and Off-Campus Learning (OCS-OCL). One-third of the class of 1974 and only one-tenth of the class of 1959--the first year of the OCS-OCL survey--expressed such plans upon graduation.

About 30 percent of this year's class will enter graduate school immediately, 10 percent will travel, are undecided, or will do other things.

The trend toward working right after college is not unique to Harvard. Yale's director of career placement. Susan Hauser, reports 70 percent of the class moving immediately into jobs, and Columbia and Princeton are experiencing record numbers as well.

Reasons for the increased interest in employment are undoubtedly partly economic. The greatest rises in the percentage of students taking jobs came in the late '70s and early '80s, coinciding with periods of economic uncertainty.

Also important is the added flexibility seniors have gained because of new openings in the job market. Many businesses have only recently begun hiring students right out of college, according to OCS-OCL Director of Recruiting Linda Z. Chernick.

The number of companies recruiting at Harvard has grown steadily from about 30 in 1972 to almost 200 this year, for example, and the number of interviews on campus has increased from 200 to 3200 in the same period, according to OCS-OCL figures.

"Fifteen or 20 years ago, everyone was going directly to graduate school because there was nothing else to do," says OCS-OCL Director Martha P. Leape. "But now seniors' options are more flexible and people don't feel locked into the first job they take."

Another reason for the increased interest in employment after college is a rising desire to take time off before entering graduate school. Leape points out that the number of seniors who plan eventually to return to their studies has been constant at about 95 percent for many years.

While the number who postpone business school has always been high, the percentage of seniors who are deferring entrance to medical, law, and arts and sciences grad schools has been rising, according to Leape.

Of those moving directly into the labor force, more than ever will be working for prestigious, high-paying businesses such as investment banking, consulting, and high-technology industries, according to Chernick.

One reason these business are heavily over-represented in students' job choices is that they are almost the only companies that can afford to come to the University to interview. While the recruiting office works to make the population of recruiting firms diverse, Chernick says. "It will never be a truly representative sample."

This year, of the 186 companies who came to Harvard, only five were in human services.

Career placement directors at other universities report similar situations, and add that students often do not appear to be interested in these jobs. At Princeton, for example, only three public interest research groups came to campus, and two of them had difficulty attracting students for interviews, according to the assistant director of career services, Steven C. Schaeffer.

And Columbia's director of career placement, Athena P. Constantine, said students' concern about starting salaries has increased markedly in recent years. "There is a heavy emphasis on 'I just want to make a lot of money,'" she said.

"Half the people going into investment banking don't know what it entails," Constantine added, "but that's where the money is."

Job choice among graduating seniors may often be the result of compromises, according to data from a seven college study, which examines career and family goals of men and women at Harvard and other schools.

Thirty percent of the students in the class of 1984 reported, in surveys given in 1981, that their career goals represented a compromise of several factors such as family plans and finances, and were not the careers that they most wanted to pursue.

Data from the study also shows that, when they entered as freshmen, men and women in the class of 1984 had almost identical career and education goals. The OCS-OCL survey of last year's graduating seniors also showed lower male-female differences than in previous years.

For the first time in at least the last 10 years, for example, slightly more women were interested in law as an eventual vocation than men. Teaching, which had traditionally been a female career, has also become more evenly divided between men and women.

Business appears to be the last field where a large difference persists, as 24 percent of the men listed it as a career plan, compared to only 16 percent of the women.