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

A year ago final-year students at the country’s leading universities were queueing up to work in the City and applications for investment banking jobs were at a record high, making it the second most popular destination for those graduating in 2008. Salary expectations reached record levels and four fifths of university-leavers believed that there would be a wide range of entry-level vacancies for new graduates.

Twelve months on, the five-year boom in the graduate job market has come to an abrupt end and the mood on campus has changed dramatically. A survey published today of more than 16,000 final-year students by High Fliers Research carried out six weeks ago shows that the Class of 2009 have a very different agenda.

The UK Graduate Careers Survey 2009 reveals that the emphasis for this year’s job-hunters is on job security and securing one of a dwindling number of places on a company graduate development scheme.

For the first time, more finalists have applied to work in teaching than any other career, applications to the public sector have increased by more than quarter and a record level of finalists hope to work in the charity or voluntary sector. The recession has prompted a resurgence of interest in technical careers, with a 46 per cent jump in applications for engineering positions and, for the first time in nine years, more finalists have applied for IT jobs.

After the collapse of Lehman Brothers and thousands more redundancies across the City, applications for investment banking have dropped by a third. This is the lowest level since 1999 and fewer finalists have applied to work in consulting, actuarial work and other areas of finance. The property sector has been hit hard, too, with a 19 per cent fall in applications.

Although in the early months of the graduate recruitment season more finalists applied for accountancy positions — the largest single graduate employers — the sector is only the fifth most popular destination for job-hunters.

Graduates’ interest in the media, however, remains high. Across all UK universities, an estimated 42,000 final-year students are hoping to land a job working in broadcasting, journalism, PR or advertising after finishing their degrees. And yet there are estimated to be fewer than one hundred graduate-level vacancies available this year between all the big media employers.

The research also highlights the difficulties that many students have faced during their job search this year. Although many finalists reacted quickly to news of the worsening economic crisis last autumn and stepped up their applications to employers, by the beginning of March a third fewer finalists had secured a definite job offer, compared with the 2008 recruitment season.

Worse still, one in six job-hunters reported making applications to employers and progressing to interviews or selection events, only to be told by employers then that their graduate recruitment had been shut down or that the jobs they had applied to were no longer available.

In the present economic climate, a third of finalists looking for work admitted that they have had to accept any job they were offered and 17 per cent said that, given the scarcity of graduate jobs, they had applied to organisations that they had little interest in working for.

The survey also shows that there is widespread concern among finalists that employers may not honour the offers of employment that they have made. Two fifths of student job-hunters fear that offers may be withdrawn before they start work this year and nearly half are worried that they may be made redundant in first year of employment.

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