Recruiting season has begun for seniors across the country. Consulting and investment banking firms with deep pockets and reputations staked on recruiting top talent will spend thousands of dollars this fall trying to muscle one another aside to attract applicants from the Class of 2001.

Recruiting season inevitably provokes much hand-wringing about the plague of business recruiters at what is allegedly a liberal-arts college. But in the end, half the class will go through recruiting. Invariably, many of the same students who spent their undergraduate years deriding "selling out" will end up at McKinsey next fall. Consulting or investment banking are safe ways to put off a career decision for a while, too; most firms don't expect their associates to stay for more than two years anyway.

But many students, caught up in the understandable anxiety of finding a job, forget the dirty secret of recruiting: Most firms want you far more than you want them. Consulting firms and investment banks are in heavy competition with one another and depend on attracting name-brand college graduates to bolster their reputations. They don't offer obscene starting salaries because they're naturally generous people: That money is there to lure you away from teaching, public service, or continuing your education.

Firms know the seniors they want most probably have many other options after graduation, and most of them don't have any particular passion for consulting (if such a thing exists). This is why they will fight so hard--and spend so much--to win you over in the next few months.

Especially in this tight labor market, students have a tremendous amount of unrealized power over the companies. If seniors at, say, Harvard, Yale and Stanford all decided tomorrow they would simply refuse to apply for jobs at a particular consulting company, other firms would immediately gain a substantial competitive advantage. After a few years, they would be able to tell potential clients that they employ twice as many Ivy-educated associates as their boycotted competitor.

How much would the companies be willing to spend to avoid being put at this competitive disadvantage? There's only one way to find out: The senior class should form a union.

Not a real union, of course, but a sort of pre-union: a collective bargaining unit that would allow students, and not the companies, to set the terms of recruiting season. Faced with the options of negotiating with the union or losing access to their most desirable recruits, companies would be under great competitive pressure to recognize the union.

The Office of Career Services (OCS) already acts in this capacity--sort of. OCS can set terms firms must agree to if they want to recruit on campus. But recruiters have found a way around OCS: like McKinsey, they can just recruit off campus.