Recruitment of young intellectuals such as college students has been an important part of the Chinese Communist Party's recruitment strategies for most of its history. Two of the college students that the Party recruited in the 1940s and 1960s went on to become the Party's top leaders in the 1990s and 2000s, and today's student Party members may well lead Chinese politics at various levels in future decades. This paper examines Party recruitment of college students in the reform era and highlights the impact of 1989. Since the 1990s the Party has stepped up its efforts at recruitment and ideological work on college students. Paradoxically the former is succeeding while the latter seems barely effective. Today's college students are striving to join the Party in large numbers, yet primarily out of a personal pragmatic concern for their future job searches and career advancement. Even student Party members do not have a strong commitment to the Party's sanctioned ideology.