- Almost half of final-year students say that the present economic gloom and rapidly contracting graduate jobs market means that they will have to take any job that they’re offered.

- In a survey of 1,017 student job-hunters from 30 universities, a fifth said that they had been forced to apply to employers that they were not really interested in and nearly half said that they expected to begin work this summer on a lower salary than they had hoped for.

- The looming recession has given Generation Y a shot of reality, with most being realistic about the scale of the job cuts and the increase in competition for positions at the largest employers. Most students confirmed that investment banking was less appealing now, as was working in property, retail, accountancy and working for small to medium-sized enterprises.

- There was a real fear that graduates could lose their jobs within the first year of employment or that job offers would be withdrawn. Most also expected graduate starting salaries to be lower than last year – although research among The Times Top 100 Employers shows that this is not the case, with average salaries rising from £25,500 last year to £27,000 this year.

- The gloomy jobs outlook is not putting most students off, although, perhaps counterintuitively, many are cancelling plans for postgraduate study or time off to look for jobs.

- Despite this, only a fifth of students said that job-hunting had been a “very high priority” for them during the autumn of 2008 and a third admitted that they should have begun looking for work earlier.

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