News that BT was axeing its gradate recruitment scheme sent further shivers down the spines of dispondant graduates.

Adding cheerfully to the misery the Guardian reports that even students graduating from elite universities are struggling to find work.

Gordon Chesterman, director of career services at Cambridge University, said: “Fortunately, we have the same number of employers coming to us, but they have less vacancies and they are tending to be filled earlier. It means that graduates still looking have fewer opportunities later in the year. In the good old days there would still be big employers looking in the summer, ready for a start in September.

“We’ve started to pick up the phone and contact organisations that may have contacted us a few years ago but have not been in touch this year,” he said.

But fortunately for accounting hopefuls everywhere; the big guys have thrown down the gauntlet on confidence in the future…

PwC, investing for the long term…

Accountants PricewaterhouseCoopers reported that applications for its 1,000 graduate places had jumped almost 40% this year from last to about 17,500. It recruited about 1,000 college leavers last year and plans to take on a similar number in 2010.

Rowena Mearle, a spokeswoman for PwC, which employs more than 15,000 people in Britain and starts its graduates on about £25,000 a year plus benefits, said: “We are holding our nerve and taking the long-term view. It takes three years to train an accountant, so we want to have enough people for when the upturn comes.”

Whilst Stephen Rolls, Deloitte’s, head of human resources, said Deloitte had learned the lesson of earlier this decade when it cut back on graduate recruitment only to find that when the economy picked up after the dotcom bust, it had too few accountants on its books:

“What we are definitely seeing this year is that fewer students are reneging on offers and are making decisions about offers much quicker. They are also turning up for interviews promptly.”

And Sara Reading, head of graduate recruitment at KPMG, concurred with the view of Stephen Rolls: “In 2002 we all cut back dramatically on numbers and then you couldn’t find a chartered accountant for love nor money.” Although she did acknowledge that KPMG was only taking on 600 graduates this year, down from a peak of 850 in 2008, adding that the firm would be concentrating on the autumn milk round for graduates and not doing extra recruitment drives in February or June as in previous years.