WITH thousands of students set to leave university this summer and walk into an uncertain jobs market,

JENNY SCOTT asks East Lancashire teenagers about to graduate what their future holds. . .

ONCE, it was all so simple.You ploughed through A-levels, served your time at university and, upon graduation, had your pick of several blue-chip, top-notch careers.

How things have changed. For this summer, as record numbers of graduates stampede on to the jobs market they will have to fight off hundreds of others with equally good qualifications to get their feet on the ladder of their chosen profession.

Whereas 25 years ago, just 12 per cent of 18-year-olds went to university, that figure now stands at 40 per cent - and the Government would like to see it increase still further.

And many youngsters will find their first job won't necessarily be at graduate level - meaning they may struggle to pay off the huge debts they've amassed during their studies.

It seems the red carpet once rolled out to graduates no longer exists and students are having to use their three years of study searching for other ways of putting themselves ahead of the field. Such has been the experience of 21-year-old Caroline Lloyd, from Beardwood, Blackburn, who will start her final year's studies at the University of Wales in Aberystwyth in September.

She has just completed a year long work placement at an accountancy firm.

Caroline made the decision to opt out for a year from her marketing and education course to spend 12 months working as a marketing assistant.

She said: "I think employers are much more interested in that sort of thing. There are going to be so many people with degrees by the time I get out on to the jobs market.

"A lot of my friends are also taking gap years to give them a bit of an edge over everyone else."

Of course, once upon a time your grades alone would have been enough to set you apart from your peers but now, as Caroline pointed out, a 2:1 grade can be two a penny. And not only are graduates finding jobs harder to come by, they are also facing higher levels of debt than ever before.

"The debts situation is quite scary," said Caroline. "I've been quite lucky because I've been earning this year, but even so I'll probably owe about £10,000 on my student loan when I graduate.

"There are people I know who aren't even looking for graduate jobs - they just want to earn enough to pay off their loans."

Anthony Holroyd, 21, from Pleasington, is not quite so pessimistic about the graduate jobs market.

He has been sitting his geography finals at Manchester University, but said he was prepared to be patient when it came to looking for a job.

"I want to make sure I get a decent degree, then I'll start looking," he said.

Like Caroline, though, he felt exasperated with the glut of university courses - many of which, he thought, seemed pointless.

"It does annoy me," he said. "You think, 'Why do people bother taking them?'

"They should change the grant system so you get awarded money according to the usefulness of your degree.

"People doing degrees in subjects like medicine should receive more funding."

According to Omar Ahmed, 20, from Darwen, a former Queen Elizabeth Grammar School student now at Trinity College, Cambridge, not only are he and his peers studying hard for their finals - they're also swotting up for the round of job interviews they'll face on leaving university.

"When you apply for jobs, you need to know what you're talking about," said Omar, who is studying law and has a summer work placement lined up at Deutsche Bank.

"It's like sitting your finals all over again. The interviewing process is pretty rigorous, so you need to read up on the company you're applying for and prove you're genuinely interested. In the old days, it didn't matter what grade you got, you could walk out of Cambridge and straight into a job.

"That's definitely changed."