Tufts University senior Negar S. Razavi, 21, turned down two job offers from nonprofit organizations because the agencies were partially funded by the Bush administration and she does not agree with the president's policies in Iraq and Iran.

Wheaton College senior Thomas L. Watson, 22, is looking for a nonprofit job that would allow him to work with inner-city children. He said he does not care how much he will be paid, as long as he can feel he is making a difference.

Watson and Razavi are among a growing number of Massachusetts college seniors to sign a pledge promising to work at socially responsible companies after graduation. As part of the project, students form campus pledge campaigns based on a national model and then have student coordinators carry around petitions or hand out fliers directing their peers to online pledges.

The goal at each school is to get as many seniors as possible to sign the pledge before commencement. The rising popularity of the pledge in Massachusetts highlights the resurgence of a strong job market after several years of economic downturn. This year's graduates will experience the strongest job market for entry-level professionals since 2002, according to an annual survey by the National Association of Colleges and Employers, a nonprofit based in Bethlehem, Pa., that tracks job trends among college graduates. In tougher years, college seniors would have been stymied by corporate cutbacks.

The pledge campaign, called the Graduation Pledge Alliance, asks seniors at dozens of colleges nationwide to sign a contract pledging to consider the social and environmental implications of any job offer in the weeks leading to graduation. The contract states, ''I pledge to explore and take into account the social and environmental consequences of any job I consider and will try to improve these aspects of any organizations for which I work."

Since 2002, branches have started at Bentley College in Waltham, Lesley University in Cambridge, Tufts in Medford, Wheaton College in Norton, and Wellesley College, according to a national coordinator for the organization. Harvard College, which hosted the pledge for eight years before taking a hiatus several years ago, will start promoting the campaign again next year. Campaign organizers say more than 600 seniors in Massachusetts have signed the pledge this year, up from fewer than 100 three years ago.

Pledge signers are expected to either turn down job offers from corporations that don't share their individual values or accept the position and work to try to change the company.

Students say the pledge promotes social awareness and shows that graduating seniors will not jump blindly at the first job offer.

''I have to be comfortable with what an organization represents," said Razavi, who helped start a pledge drive at Tufts in 2005. About 150 students in the Tufts graduating class, or 12 percent, have signed the pledge this year, up from 110 students last year.

The pledge was created by administrators at Humboldt State University in California in 1987. It has grown to about 100 colleges, said Neil Wollman, the senior coordinator for the alliance and a senior fellow at the Peace Studies Institute at Manchester College in Indiana, which began hosting the program in 1996.

Some employers who said they admire the pledge assert that their recruiters discuss corporate responsibility when they visit campuses.

''We are very interested in candidates who match up with what we do at a corporate responsibility level," said Todd L. Martin, a spokesman for IBM, based in Armonk, N.Y.

Still, student organizers acknowledged that some students do not take the pledge seriously. ''We are realistic," said Watson, the Wheaton senior, who signed up 240 out of 400 fellow seniors. ''But for those students who sign the pledge and don't think about it right now, maybe further down the line it will remind them to think, 'Oh, I'm in this company, what can I do to make a difference?' "

© 2006 Boston Globe

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