Should universities teach students how to find a job?

The class of 2009 left university knowing they were facing the toughest battle for jobs in a generation. The outlook for the 300,000 young men and women who were leaving university appeared decidedly bleak, with warnings that the number of new graduates out of work would be double that of the previous year, that students who had graduated from English universities would be the most indebted in history, and that up to 40,000 graduates would be still looking for work six months after leaving university.

That was, at least, the dire prediction, but what was the reality? I have spent the last year documenting the post-graduation lives of six students who are among the class of 2009. The six studied at the University of Leeds and Leeds Metropolitan University, and agreed to keep audio diaries throughout their year in which they recorded their hopes for the coming year as well as their reaction to the reality.

By the end of the year, the six students were scattered around the world and were far more cynical about the value of a university education than they had been on graduating. Back in the summer of 2009 they had all been reasonably clear about the type of work they were seeking. Jonathan Page, who had graduated in biochemistry, had his mind set on the sales industry. Fiona Knight, who studied neuroscience at the University of Leeds, was contemplating a shift in focus – she had decided to try to get a job in the media. Mohsin Ali, a computer studies graduate from Leeds Metropolitan, wanted to work in online research and development. Caroline Gerrard had ambitions to work in sound design. Samantha Del Core hoped to work in interior design, and Lauren Hughes wanted to be a journalist.

Hughes told me that she had been realistic about what the employment market would be like. "My expectations after leaving university were quite low," she says. "Graduating amongst the hype of the economic crisis meant that I was fully prepared to not be able to get a job easily, especially when my aspirations were to go into journalism, which is such a competitive field."

Others were less hard-headed. In an audio diary recorded soon after graduating, Gerrard predicted that within six months she would be "in a high-powered job in sound design and really loving it". Knight said that she "wanted to do something that is exciting, I am not happy just doing nine to five, I want a way of life not just a job", while Page claimed that he would not expect to start on anything less than £30,000 a year.

Inevitably, reality has taken a wrecking ball to some of these rather optimistic notions. "Initially when I graduated I thought I would be unemployed for a month or two," said Gerrard. "After a month or so I'd tried over 70 companies and I only had positive responses from two. The earliest opportunity was about five months later for a week of unpaid work."

Page and Ali both left the country to seek work in Cyprus and Saudi Arabia, while Del Core found the soul-crushing business of being rejected hard to take. "I've looked for jobs in newspapers, at the job centre, on the internet, and by word of mouth," she says. "I've had several interviews, some of which I got to the second stage, but I never got past that. It has been quite disheartening – some positions I applied for were more the dream job than a means to an end, and I was very upset when I didn't get those. I was in tears."

Having spent time with the graduates, I was struck by how much they seemed to have believed, at least at the start, that they were entitled to a well-paid and fulfilling job simply because they had been to university. "When you look at the people who are going to university," explains Professor Kate Purcell, of Warwick University's Institute for Employment Research, "they have been encouraged to think that education has given them employability skills, so as well as learning about history or English or business studies they are also learning problem solving, developing communication skills, so they are pretty confident about themselves."

This confidence is not necessarily well founded. I attended a graduate careers fair at the University of Leeds earlier this summer, where I spoke to some employers who gave me a rather different perspective on the calibre of this year's graduates. Susie Young is the recruitment manager at Waitrose and she told me that out of the 2,500 applications they had received they still could not fill the 20 graduate positions that were available. "A lot of the graduates are scared," she said. "They think there are no opportunities out there so they apply for anything and everything and they don't really invest in the time to really look into each organisation."

Will Corder, recruitment adviser at Kimberly-Clark, told a similar story. "I find that there are quite a few people who apply to us who can't even spell Kimberly-Clark – even though it is written on the application form," he says. "A lot of people go to university for the sake of it because they think it is the right thing to do. So that makes lots of graduates. Universities are still selling the idea to people that if they go to university they are guaranteed a great job at the end of it, and that is just not the case any more."

It was at the Labour party conference in 1999 that Tony Blair announced that by 2010 50% of school leavers would be enrolled in higher education. Although the Labour government quietly abandoned that target last year, the latest numbers from the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills show that they actually came pretty close to meeting it: by 2009, university participation rates among 17- to 30-year-olds had risen to 45%. But while the numbers may be up, the consequent rise in social mobility that this policy was intended to help with hasn't been achieved. According to a report last year called Fair Access to the Professions, a graduate's chances of getting into one of the top professions – such as law, medicine, politics or the media – are still heavily influenced by background, as today's young professionals in these areas come from families with an income that is up to 27% higher than average.

The increasing number of graduates entering the job market has meant that employers are often insisting that prospective employees pass psychometric tests as a way of selecting candidates, and it has also led to claims that too many young people are being herded into university.

"When I think about a university course, I think of something that teaches people a skill so that they are qualified to do a certain job," says Gerrard. "But, in reality, after my degree I don't feel qualified for anything – degrees don't indicate someone's common sense or people skills, and I don't think you can get through many interviews without a little of both."

All our students left university with large debts and they had strong views about how university education should be funded in the future. The prospect of a graduate tax, recently floated by the business secretary, Vince Cable, was met with some scepticism. "I can see the rationale behind a graduate tax," said Hughes, who currently has debts of around £11,000. "But I cannot see the benefit in the current economic climate. It seems unfair to charge a higher tax rate on graduates without providing enough jobs to enable them to be able to pay. And it may make people less serious about going to university as the tax is imposed after graduation."

One year after graduating none of the students is quite where they hoped to be. Hughes is spending two months travelling around South Asia before she returns to Britain to save money for a post-graduate course in journalism she wants to start next year. Page is soon to start work at a headhunting agency in London. Del Core is still sending out her CV to interior design companies and trying to set up her own website. Knight is still working as a receptionist. Gerrard is working in a local theatre in Newcastle, and Ali is in Saudi Arabia contemplating a return to Britain.

Like the 14.9% of graduates who are unemployed, our graduates haven't had the best of years, at least in terms of getting a job. Some of them told me they felt that university had not properly equipped them for the hard world of work. "We were meant to be taught about CV writing and how to do job interviews but it was all self-learning," says Del Core. "When I would ask questions I wouldn't get an answer so I don't feel I was taught anything new. I felt more patronised than anything else."

"The only career guidance we got was to write a CV each year for their records," says Page. "I was taught nothing about how to succeed in interviews."

Despite these complaints, perhaps the most surprising, and heartening, thing I discovered in following the graduates over the last year was that, for all the talk of debt and recession, they would not have given up the chance to go to university. "Living away from home and having to fend for myself taught me to use my own initiative," explained Hughes. "It made me a lot more independent."

The class of 2009 may have entered the job market at a bleak time but, one year on, they were grateful for their chance to spend three years studying and socialising. Gerrard spoke for the entire group when she reflected: "I probably didn't get what I thought I would out of my course, but I can't say I wish I hadn't done it, as that would mean I wouldn't have met some of my best friends."

From: www.guardian.co.uk