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.

Student loans are one of the cheapest forms of long term debt possible. Pay them off early and you'll lose access to some of the lowest borrowing rates around, something that might well come in handy in future.

If nothing else, you can dump your student debts into a high interest savings account, which should give you better returns than the cost of servicing your student loan.

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Bea Carter, 21, is one of thousands of new graduates who are unemployed as 18-to 24-year-olds bear the brunt of the economic downturn.

This year's graduates face the toughest battle in a generation for jobs, with tens of thousands facing unemployment, according to evidence documenting the impact of the economic downturn.

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Students at one of Britain's biggest universities have become the first in the country to ban bottled still water from all their bars, cafes and shops, sacrificing annual profits of £32,000.

A referendum at Leeds University has voted overwhelmingly to phase out the product by the end of next year, to allow campus stores to absorb the loss of their biggest-selling line.

Thousands more students than expected will be affected by the cut to student grants, according to new figures.

An extra 90,000 students will lose out because of a government miscalculation, the Students Loans Company estimates.

The Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills (DIUS) admitted in October that it had underestimated the number of students eligible for a full student maintenance grant and lowered the threshold for receipt of funding for a partial grant by £10,000 - having raised it in July.

Middle-income parents will be forced to pay more for their children’s university education after the Government miscalculated the number of students eligible for grants.

It was forced to renege on some of its funding commitments after admitting it had underestimated the number of people entitled to a full student maintenance grant this year by almost 10 per cent.

Teenagers from the poorest homes have their hands tied when choosing a university because most can only afford to live at home, a study published today shows.

More than half - 53% - of students from families who work in manual jobs or are on benefits chose their university because it was close to home, a poll by the National Union of Students and HSBC found.

1. Organise club nights

With many students out on the tiles two or three times a week there’s money to be made in entertaining them. Birmingham University graduate Gary Linton set up his own promotions company with a couple of friends in the holidays before his final year. "We established a brand, set up a website, scouted out suitable venues, designed flyers and hired bands." As the money began to pour in – at its peak, the company was pulling in profits of between £800 and £1000 each week – they were able to employ a team to hand out flyers and a manager to oversee them. "It was a fantastic experience and I learned a lot about running a business. But it did require a good deal of work".

They go to one of the world’s most prestigious universities and pride themselves on their superior intellect but almost half of Cambridge students admit they are not immune from the temptation to cheat and submit essays they find on Google, a survey suggests.

The results of an anonymous online poll of more than 1,000 students conducted by the student newspaper Varsity found that 49 per cent of undergraduates pass other people's work off as their own at some point during their university career.