School Gate blog: is there any point going to university if you can't get a job afterwards?

Graduate vacancies at the country’s leading employers have been cut by a sixth this year, but lucrative opportunities still await university leavers prepared to stack supermarket shelves.

The discount retailer Aldi is named today as the best-paying graduate recruiter, offering a starting salary of £40,000, rising to £60,000 after three years, and an Audi 4 company car.

The pay beats the £39,000 offered at Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer and the £38,000 at Slaughter and May, which top the list of law firms that make up most of the best-paying companies for graduates, according to a survey of graduate vacancies for The Times Top 100 Graduate Employers. It also compares favourably with the £38,000 offered by investment banks, which are cutting back on graduate recruitment.

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The study, by the market researcher High Fliers, shows that this year’s intake of new graduates is to be cut by 17 per cent. Of the 40,000-plus graduate jobs that employers had hoped to offer last year and this year, almost 7,000 have been cancelled or left unfilled. For students in the class of 2009, who will graduate with debts of up to £20,000, the prospects look grim.

Half of the 1,117 final-year students surveyed think that they will have to take any job that they are offered, and a fifth have applied to employers in whom they have little or no interest.

Dan Ronald, regional managing director for Aldi, which broke into the world’s top ten retailers yesterday with a 25 per cent increase in British sales, admits the company may not be the first choice for many graduates.

“Nobody grows up wanting to be a discount retail executive. But if you look beyond the job title, it’s a people-focused job that offers great opportunities for progression,” he said.

Aldi graduate trainees learn their trade from the shop floor up. Those most likely to impress are those who have proved their leadership skills in extracurricular activities.

“If their achievements are purely academic, then they probably wouldn’t be right for us,” Mr Ronald said, adding that a third of recruits would drop out within three years.

Aldi is expanding its graduate recruitment scheme from 100 places last year to 150 this year and is receiving 2,000 applications for every post. “We are now talking to graduates from Oxford, Cambridge, Durham, Bristol and other leading universities,” he said.

Martin Birchall, of High Fliers, said that cuts in graduate recruitment had taken place in almost every sector. But it was worst in the City, where there were 47 per cent fewer entry-level jobs in investment banking this year. Graduate starting salaries, however, were expected to rise 6 per cent this year to an average of £27,000, as most had been set before the full depth of the recession was known.

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