- most of this pool of students you do not want to tap into. They're the ones who will do more harm than good, assuming they were even interested in doing any work. My impression from my time in college was that the majority of my colleagues were utterly incompetent and had no real desire to become competent. There's no hope for these people, and IMHO they make up the bulk of the "there are no jobs out there!" crowd upon graduation. These are the guys who do the bare minimum on assignments and have never written a line of code that wasn't required by a class, and get indignant when their framed piece of paper doesn't automatically deliver big paychecks on a silver platter.

- the rest are worthwhile talent, but competition amongst employers for many of them is fierce. I have a friend right now who has extremely high-paying offers from just about every big software shop out there, as a soon-to-graduate undergrad. In recent years I've seen MS (and some other companies) poach interns from other tech companies at the interview stage. Pay levels are quite high, approaching full-time levels in some places.

As a cost-conscious startup, you have to work hard to find the people that the Big Boys have overlooked. Recruitment processes is an extremely imprecise science, and from experience I've seen a lot of qualified people unfairly rejected because of dumb things like not having the right keywords in a resume to pass the inbound filter, or edged out because they froze up on a single interview question. There are quite a few of these guys out there, but the problem is that because many do not know how to market themselves, it's hard to distinguish them from the incompetent, worthless demographic.

- Get a bunch of well-respected people together

- Create something exciting

- Use your connections to find people that you know are good