> I don't know when you graduated but I've been working professionally for nearly 2 decades now and I heard the same thing when I graduated - about how it was so much easier just 5, 10, 15 years prior, how I was in for a real battle, how I had an insurmountable amount of debt given my earnings prospects.

On the whole the graduate market has indeed been getting fairly steadily worse, and student greater, for the past forty or more years, no?