Students and alumni at 22 prestigious colleges and universities announced on Thursday that they were forming a new activist group to promote socially responsible investment policies for American colleges' endowments.

The Responsible Endowments Coalition, as the group is known, was originated by students at Duke University, the University of Pennsylvania, and Barnard, Swarthmore, and Williams Colleges. Membership now includes both students and graduates of institutions such as Amherst, Boston, and Carleton Colleges, and Brown, Columbia, and Yale Universities.

Colleges represented by the activists have combined endowments in excess of $56-billion, the coalition said.

The group advocates using the investment of university endowments as a tool to promote social good. Strategies toward that end, the group said, include investing in progressive companies, divesting from companies whose practices undermine economic and social democracy, and voting on shareholder resolutions as a means of reforming companies' harmful policies.

The coalition's Web site says those tactics have persuaded Home Depot to stop using old-growth timber in its wood products, RJR Nabisco to discontinue its "Joe Camel" advertisements, and ARCO to withdraw from Myanmar, as Burma is now known.

The push for socially responsible investing began with a divestment campaign against companies with Pentagon contracts during the Vietnam War, the group said. The movement gained greater currency in the 1980s, during a campaign to divest from corporations supporting the apartheid regime in South Africa.

"This issue is not going away," said Mark Orlowski, a senior at Williams College and a co-founder of the group. "It's only getting bigger."

Mr. Orlowski estimated that fewer than two dozen colleges currently review and vote on shareholder resolutions. A failure to vote their proxies means that colleges are not supporting shareholder proposals that are aligned with their institutional values.

"There's a real disconnect there," he said.

A few institutions, though, have made the connection. About five years ago, students at Swarthmore College pushed it to establish a committee on socially responsible investing that provides advice on shareholder-resolution votes.

The committee, which includes students and members of the investment office, seeks to promote equal-opportunity employment policies, global environmental initiatives, and worldwide labor standards. Most recently, it has begun pushing for disclosure of political contributions by companies in which the college has invested.

Swarthmore has also introduced shareholder resolutions of its own, including one that led the Lockheed Martin Corporation to ban discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, said Suzanne P. Welsh, the college's treasurer and vice president for finance.

Ultimately, though, trustees and endowment managers are guided by a fiduciary responsibility to maximize institutional resources, an obligation that can trump social concerns. Ms. Welsh has found that Swarthmore's trustees welcome advice from the college's committee on socially responsible investing, but "they haven't taken it in every single case."