It’s happening as students heave their belongings into dorm rooms, as they register for freshman classes, and even as they head into campus bars.

At colleges nationwide, Democrats, Republicans, and nonpartisan groups are competing in a mad rush to register students in swing states, where they say students could tip the balance and yield the prized bundle of electoral votes that would change the outcome of the presidential election.

At schools ranging from Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, which has 1,400 students, and the University of Wisconsin in Madison, where there are more than 40,000 undergraduate and graduate students, volunteers are pressing students to vote in their new home states.

“There’s a massive operation underway in Wisconsin,” the spokesman for a group called America Coming Together, Eric Phillips, said. “You’ve got voter registration, leafleting, door-to-door campaigns, chalking on sidewalks. If you are just coming to Wisconsin you are instantaneously going to see all of this political activity.”

Though the concept of strategic voting is not new, there is undoubtedly a heightened awareness about it this year, especially as President Bush and his opponent, Senator Kerry, direct a majority of their campaign dollars and attention to states that are not solidly blue or red.

Students from places like New York, which are all but locked up in the election, are being treated like royalty by clipboard-clutching volunteers moments after stepping on campus. And many students say they would rather cast their vote where it is going to have the greatest impact.

“In Florida, you had something like 527 votes determine the election,” said a Swarthmore senior, Sam Berger, a member of the school’s voter registration coalition. “Swarthmore has 1,400 students.”

An e-mail the coalition sent students on Saturday reads: “There are a few states that could go either way in November. Pennsylvania is one of those states. If you want your vote for President to matter this November, register in PA.”

In the past, nonpartisan groups like Rock the Vote, which aims to register students of all political stripes, have dominated. But this year, groups like Swing the State, Swing Semester, the League of Pissed Off Voters, and the New Voter Project have been added to the mix and are deploying hundreds of predominately young volunteers to schools in all of the hotly contested “battleground” states.

“This election is going to be neck and neck,” said the communications director for the Kerry-Edwards campaign in Pennsylvania, Mark Nevins. ” It could be decided by a few thousand votes and, if it is, one college campus could make a big difference.”

Though Mr. Nevins said he believed that many in the 18-to-24 age bracket would favor Mr. Kerry, Republicans have a different take.

The chairman of the College Republican National Committee, Eric Hoplin, said there’s been a significant increase in membership in his organization since September 11, 2001. The committee, he said, has 60 full-time employees who have registered 20,000 new college Republicans in the last few weeks on 1,148 swing-state campuses.

“Our goal is to register 125,000,” Mr. Hoplin said. “We are going door-to-door in every college dorm and at every fraternity and sorority house asking students whether they support George Bush and registering them to vote if they do.”

In almost all cases, residents need only to have lived in a state for 30 days before being eligible to vote there, leaving plenty of time to enlist students and reinforce the message.

“This is the biggest effort we’ve ever seen,” the spokesman for the nonpartisan New Voters Project, Ivan Frishberg, said. The group has already registered 188,719 18- to 24-year-olds in New Mexico, Nevada, Colorado, Wisconsin, Wisconsin, and Iowa.

“It’s not just students,” he said. “It’s all young people. We’re hanging out in gas stations, Laundromats, and bars, in addition to all of the obvious places to register voters. We are registering people everywhere we possibly can.”

In a place like Wisconsin, which has 10 electoral votes, students may be able to ensure the race for one candidate if they come out in record numbers.

But some say the real question is will young voters, who historically have had low turnout numbers, defy past trends?

Yale professor Donald Green, author of “Getting Out the Vote! How to Increase Voter Turnout,” said it is not likely, but he acknowledged that this year’s political landscape is unique and the jury is still out.